The challenge was to take a piece of cardboard, a picture of a frog and a rubber band
and to make the frog jump using these materials.
Although at first it seemed rather simple, for me, the tricky part was putting the idea I had in my head, into actuality. Instantly, I wanted to somehow hold the cardboard, with the frog on top of it and attach the rubber band so that you could flick it from underneath and the impact would send the frog flying off the cardboard. But when it came down to actually attaching the rubber band to the cardboard, in a way that you could pull it down and let it rip, without injuring yourself - I was stuck.
The design process itself is structured into four parts:
1. Investigate
2. Design
3. Produce
4. Evaluate
This process of producing, testing and then evaluating is wonderful in that it encourages children to re-assess designs and make changes, rather than presenting their design as a failed attempt.
1. To investigate we talked about the ways in which energy could be generated with the materials we had to achieve our challenge.
2. In design, we talked about the best way of using our materials to achieve this.
3. For producing we folded our cardboard so that the rubber band was in the middle of it, and put the frog on top. Despite my best efforts though, I did more to injure myself than to make my frog jump.
4. For analysing and evaluating we looked at what had perhaps been good in our design and attempted to change it (without much success I must admit ;-)
Eventually I worked out that the best way for the frog to jump was to just throw the bloody thing ;-p
During this session I also played with a program called Quia, which was fun, although a bit tricky to navigate at first. It's a great site that allows you to design activities, quizzes, calendars and so much more and to share all your resources with other educators. I used it to create a hangman game.
http://www.quia.com
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