Wildflower Planter Project
How can we attract wildlife to the area?
Term: Spring 2015 No. Teachers: 3 No. Students: 70 What was the brief? Students were commissioned to make garden planters to help attract wildlife to the school garden. What was the situation? This was a STEM project involving two maths teachers and a design teacher. Having already built an allotment in the garden the previous year with year 7s, this project was about developing the school garden further to start attracting more local wildlife and building a natural habitat. We had been given boxes of wild flowers by Grow Wild, a charity supported by Kew Gardens amongst other bodies, that wanted to promote the conservation of wild flowers that were dying out across the UK. We decided that this was a good way to attract local wildlife to the area and so this became the basis of the project. It was also a way to get the students applying their mathematical knowledge of basic trigonometry and understanding of area and volume. What were the outcomes? - Scaled 1:6 design drawings and mathematical workings - Finance sheet with total expenditure - Model prototype of final design - CAD design of final layout of all planters - Final planter in situ What were the learning objectives? - To design a functional product based on a specification - To contribute to the local community - To show a mathematical understanding of area, volume, converting units and representing 2D shapes - To demonstrate an understanding of basic carpentry skills including: measuring, marking, cutting, refining, assembling and finishing What did I learn? Although I have always had a keen interest and competent understanding of carpentry as a result of making sculptures/installations and doing DIY projects, I had never taught design technology and this presented different challenges to what I usually faced when planning art and design lessons. I was surprised at the amount of research that needed to be done in ordering the right resources, checking the quality of wood, ensuring that the machinery was capable of meeting the design ideas of students. Needless-to-say, this project taught me a great deal about the design process and clarified the stages that needed to be undertaken. In the fine arts, process can be very idiosyncratic as artists develop and refine ideas in different ways which are often not linear. However, when working with a design specification with clearer parameters and a client brief, it becomes easier to work through a series of planned stages from identifying the brief to researching the situation and developing a specification before coming up with designs and then realising them. The year 8 students were very enthusiastic and positive making them a pleasure to teach. This might be because there were many challenging practical tasks to complete and the medium was new to many of them since they had not experienced carpentry or CAD designing before. The woodwork skills required were relatively simple, but designing was more complex and there were many problems to troubleshoot as cutting wood to theoretical measurements is notoriously complicated since wood is not always cut precisely or can change form. In terms of collaboration with the other teachers, there was little opportunity to come together with the students as this project was run during different lesson times. By having clear deadlines for the production of scaled designs, it made it easier to facilitate the process as a design teacher. I am not sure how satisfying it was for the maths teachers as the application of knowledge all took place outside of their subject time. This raises a number of issues about how collaboration between teachers can ever feel truly integrated when teaching apart. By having a clear division of responsibilities for parts of the design process, it makes the process easier. It seems that teacher collaboration is the single most complex aspect of the PBL process as each teacher has a different set of expectations of what it entails. Some believe that the entire process should be shared and team taught, but I find that the design and making process is a specialist skill best suited to those that teach subjects with a creative process. |
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