Spring Catapult

Check out this cool spring catapult created by one of our home schoolers in a design thinking workshop.

Prototyping: A Design Thinking Skill

Last night, parent Dan S. and I built a couple of tables for the New Design Lab project that our head of school announced a few weeks ago.  The lumber had been sitting in the room for a couple of weeks, and we were both eager to get these structures done. 

It's worth mentioning that Dan had a lot more carpentry experience than I've had.  I've built a couple of Adirondack chairs, and assembled a worktable very much like this one.  He's built some cabinets, some furniture, some other projects, and more.  He's also got a much larger tool-set than I have. I have an impact drill and a circular saw, a set square and a long level; in addition to that, he's got a mitre saw and some other quite useful tools for cutting and shaping wood.  Even so, we'd build a couple of things like this before, and how much trouble could it be?

Nonetheless, there were a couple of times when we stopped working, stared at the parts we'd cut and the screws and drills and measuring tools lying about in the sawdust. Anyone looking through the windows would have assumed we were a couple of dummies who'd just made a major mistake.  We weren't dummies, though. We were thinking.  Hard.

The IDS Design Thinking Manifesto assigns the heptagon to the mental mindset of prototyping.  The seven-sided polygon is one of the most difficult shapes to create, geometrically.  It requires an estimation technique called neusis to complete; and if the geometer doesn't estimate correctly, the heptagon looks lopsided and weird.  We were going through our own process of neusis as we built those two tables — using straight edges, right angles, levels, and other tools to confirm that the frames of our tables were built at right angles to each other and to the floor; that the table tops would be level; that the legs would all rest on the floor and there wouldn't be any wobble (or at least, not very much).  

And that's prototyping in a nutshell, really.  We built two tables in three hours, and under normal circumstances you'd assume that meant an hour-and-a-half per table.  But really, it was two and a quarter hours for one table, and forty-five minutes for the second.   A lot of that extra time, we were looking at pictures and reading explanatory text in the manual; neither of us had built a table quite like this before; and just because it was going to be for a workshop space was no reason not to do it right.

Even so, we still got it wrong.  

As we prepared to cut the plywood panel down from 4x8 feet to the four tabletops and lower shelves of the two tables, we discovered that the frame of our first table was not square.  Could we fix it by hammering on the frame? No.  Could we twist the frame by hand into the right shape? Sort of, but not really. How was this going to affect our final result?  Should we unscrew the frame, and try again? 

All at once, a simple solution occurred to us. Maybe we should measure the frame and see how much the actual construction was off from the intended design.  The answer surprised both of us — a little less than 1/8".  We could see the distortion in the frame when compared with a totally square piece of plywood; but once the plywood was cut, the distortion would be invisible. Our obsession with neusis — close, deliberate, estimation — had paid off.

We cut the plywood.  As I did so, the circular saw drifted offline, and I wound up cutting a deep gouge into the sheet of plywood — the stuff we needed for the other table!  Oh no!  We stood there for a good long while, trying to figure out how to solve the problem; Dan said a couple of placating words, but you could tell he was disappointed in me for screwing up.

We stood there for a while trying to figure out how to work around the mistake.  My mistake.

Then we shrugged, and moved on.  We re-allocated how the plywood sheet would be cut. This time, Dan would cut the plywood, and I would manage the process of weighting down the sheet and holding it stable for the saw.  Again, during the main cut, the circular saw drifted off the true line, and this time Dan cut a bit off that 'ruined' the sheet of plywood.  

Cutting plywood is a maddening experience, you may guess.

We re-re-allocated the remaining plywood, shifting those two remaining panels from being the tops of tables to being the lower shelves; and reserving our two original pieces (which looked BEAUTIFUL, by the way) for the tops of the tables.  We decided to save the second sheet of plywood for another purpose, which I'll describe at another time.  

In the midst of this process, Dan asked me if we should assemble the other frame to the point that we'd reached with the first frame.  I dithered for a while, I admit.  It would be nice to have two tables almost finished.  

At the last moment, though, my eye landed on a paper along one of the windows, a quotation by former NASA engineer Scott Billups.  Scott is, in many ways, a 'nobody'.  You won't find a celebratory biography of him on a website, nor a Wikipedia entry, nor anything of that sort; you might not even find his Facebook page.  But something he said to me resonated, and it's a rule I've tried to adopt in our Design Lab ever since: "Build the whole prototype, well past the first mistake. That way, you'll discover ALL of the mistakes, and learn how to avoid them."  

I told Dan, "Let's finish this table.  And figure out what we did wrong by comparing with the manual."

So we did. We finished the first table.  Then we compared it with our original build instructions.  Along the way, we discovered that all of our original mistakes, that led to the slight twist in our first frame, were the result of not following the directions.  We followed the directions the second time through; and behold!  The second table took less time, and was more exactingly constructed — and even so, it's the table with more wobble in it.  

How did that happen?

Well, it turns out that materials aren't always perfect.  A plywood board, or any wood at all, can have a bit of warp in it. The 'perfect' materials that are found in instruction guides are rarely found at your local hardware store.  You have to learn to adjust, and move on.

That's prototyping in action.

Your Kids and Prototyping

Children go through the same process that Dan and I went through while building these tables.  There are times when they stand around, looking at what they've built. There are times when they have to look at the materials and equipment and tools, and times when they have to stop and ask questions. There are times when the assembly process hasn't gone according to plan.  There are times when the work has to be completely taken apart, and re-constructed. 

This is normal.

It's not failure to go back and correct your mistakes.  Even with the most careful estimation, the most careful measurement, mistakes still happen.  Your frame is going to be off by an eighth of an inch.  Sometimes that miniscule distance matters a lot. Sometimes it doesn't matter at all — but you won't know until you finish building your prototype.  

It's important to keep going.  Even when you get stuck, even when the effort seems to be a failure.  Build the whole prototype, and learn from the mistakes, and then figure out which mistakes matter and need to be corrected; and which ones don't.

That's the lesson we're trying to impart when we teach Design Thinking to you and to your children — that it's hard to tell which mistakes matter until the work is done.  And once the work is done, it's usually clear that the mistakes are part and parcel of the success.

Of Dowels and Design Thinking

There’s no better way to build teamwork and cooperation than to work on a design-thinking project as our third, fourth and fifth graders recently did because the entire premise of design thinking rests upon communication and collaboration. The cross-graded challenge we gave to our students: construct a freestanding structure using only 40 dowels and rubber bands that can house all of your teammates comfortably.

Prior to the exercise, the teachers discussed the social goals of the activity with the students and explained that the process of working together outweighed the end result. Most importantly, the students had to include everyone in the activity and listen to everyone’s ideas, even the ideas that were far fetched.

The students set out to the school field armed with dowels, rubber bands and plenty of enthusiasm.  Before they got started, the teammates huddled together and whooped a cheer. Each group was paired with a teacher/moderator to facilitate the brainstorming.

And then the ideas flowed:

“What about an airport?”

“I want something really tall!”

“Let’s build a castle with a moat!”

“Where are we going to get the water?’

“Listen!" one chimed in, " There are no bad ideas.”

“Everyone’s talking at the same time!”

“I like the idea of the moat, but maybe we should focus on the castle first.”

The facilitator gently steered and directed to keep the conversation positive as

students talked over one another and grappled at times to stay on task. Nonetheless, the students pulled each other along – the reticent student to the take charge one - to create their concept.  That’s teamwork.

Whereas some groups drew a prototypes of their design, other groups jumped right in on constructing their piece Students self- selected their roles as some worked on building a base, and others wrapped rubber bands to secure the dowels together which required a special technique. Elements of some structures collapsed and the students stepped back to discuss solutions. Where one student struggled, another offered a suggestion.

After discussing their group projects, each individual student reflected on their ability to cooperate by filling out a questionnaire: How well did you cooperate with your group? What does cooperation mean to you? What specific advice would you give other team members to improve their cooperation?

Through the exercise students demonstrated not only cooperation but assertion, responsibility, empathy and self-control. Design Thinking requires not only a great idea but also the social and emotional intelligence to see that idea to fruition.

Prototyping and Design Thinking

It's said that the famous inventor Nikola Tesla, who died in 1943 after contributing to many major projects in electricity and early advances in telecommunications, had the ability to sit at his desk and imagine all of the parts of his inventions.  Only once he was clear how all the parts worked would he bother to make a drawing and build a prototype.  Several of his former business and laboratory partners attested to his almost-magical ability to build a prototype from scratch, and yet have the machine work the very first time it was turned on.

The rest of us? We need to work at it.

Prototyping goes by many names in many different fields:

• In writing, it's a rough draft
• In fashion, it's called a sloper or a muslin
• In computer programming, it's called pseudocode
• In art, it's called a sketch or a doodle.
• In architecture, it's called a plan and elevation or a scale model
• In science, it's called a hypothesis
• In music, it's called jamming.
• In dance, it's called freeform movement
• In carpentry, it's called a scale model or a draft plan
• In sports, it's called a playbook
• In mechanics and electronics design, it's called a Lo-res prototype;
• In physics and mathematics, it's called a thought experiment.

The idea behind all of these, though, is that we rarely go from an idea in the mind to a finished product.  There are intermediate stages, and nearly all of those intermediate stages begin with what the writer Ann Lamott famously called a "sh$%#y first draft" in her book on writing, Bird by Bird.

Which is where Design Thinking comes into the educational process, and why prototyping — in any medium — is such an important part of Design Thinking.  Without a model that helps show the difference between what your internal vision is, and the reality you're trying to achieve, it's hard to show other people your plan or get them excited in your project.  You have to make something real, something tangible, something solid. Otherwise it's all just a vision, a mental dream.

This is why, in the Design Thinking Lab at IDS, we make a wider range of tools available to students than they commonly carry in their pencil bags: saws and drills, utility knives, heat guns, glue guns, cutting mats, carving tools, geometers' compasses.  It's why students get access to a wide range of materials: wood, plastic, metal, mesh, fabric, wire, string, rubber bands, paper, foamcore and more.

Access to tools and materials allow students a greater range of creative understanding.  It gives them the opportunity to cultivate their awareness of how different materials work, and what kind of processes and tools affect those materials.  It gives them a greater capacity to make and create in the future... and it teaches them to start working on projects earlier than they would otherwise, because they learn how difficult it is to make something real and beautiful.

In the IDS Design Process, Prototyping is represented by the geometric shape, the orange heptagon.  The seven-sided regular figure is nearly impossible to achieve

Prototype of Super-Cyborg Gadget Glove

with a straight edge and compass; and creating a vibrant orange color from only yellow and red paint is equally difficult.  Both the color and the shape serve a reminder that making real-world objects and processes has unique challenges — challenges that are only solved through practice, trial and error, and persistence. 

"Let go of "I think I know the answer...""

...that's how our 8th grade Algebra teacher started the class. Not so easy advice. We're all predisposed to believing certain outcomes. It takes an open mindedness to challenge our thinking plus two rulers, a stopwatch, a quarter and some textbooks.

The teacher asked the class to design a "racetrack", a clear plastic ruler,  and to observe how the choices the students made impacted the speed of the "car" or quarter. The height of the stack of textbooks was the rise and the distance between the edge of the textbooks and the end of the ruler was the run.

Working in pairs, the students gathered and charted data by observing what happens when you vary the rise and keep the run constant, vary both the rise and the run and lastly, to vary the run and to keep the rise constant.

It's amazing what a little wonder can do for learning in a classroom.

What Does Design Thinking Look Like?

Some have asked the question, “What does Design Thinking look like? “ Well, the simple answer is, “It depends.” From building models with egg crates, straws and pipe cleaners on the floor to small group discussion planning classroom rules, Design Thinking utilizes different formats for different types problem solving. What is consistent from each DT challenge is identifying the problem and working collaboratively to reach a resolution.

In the simplest terms, design thinking is problem solving with empathy, with a human touch. It starts with listening to and understanding the needs of those around you and working together to address the challenge. Students test their ideas, use one another’s creativity, see if they work, create new one if they don’t. It’s messy a process and it is designed to be that way. Students build a better end result by continually accessing their work. Rather than the teacher driving the process, the students have a voice, which increases their engagement and deepens their understanding.

Take for instance, Ms. Ravid’s Sixth Grade English class authentic problem: how to build a color coded library sorting system representing various genres of their choosing so that students could access their books more readily. The goal: students should be able to find a specific book title, locate a type of book or add and classify a new book to the collection.  Ms. Ravid. told the students to think through future problems that might arise. Working in small groups of three to four, she said that each group should recommend possible solutions. Ms. Ravid said, “This is not a competition to win. Our most important resource is each other.”

Everyone had a job to do: a recorder to capture the ideas and suggestions, an individual to collect a selection of various books, another to read the book jackets to understand the genre. After twenty minutes of this exercise one member of the group rotated to another group and discussed their findings. Eventually the four groups became two as they continued to brainstorm working together and in different combinations.

From this exercise, the students developed and defined seven categories that were common to each group: biography and autobiography, realistic fiction, historical fiction, fantasy, non-fiction, reference and science fiction. Although the categories may not be academically correct, the process challenged students to think about nuances between the different genres. For instance, the students defined fantasy as a genre that “uses powers beyond the forces of nature such as magic or superpowers”. Their definition for science fiction includes books that feature “futuristic technology that the world has not seen yet but seems reasonable given our current understanding of the universe.” Additionally, the class researched various classifications of books authentically learning as they developed their own categories. For the outlier books that the students could not fit into easy classification, the class will review and see how they may fit into the current classifications. Students will then color code the books and live with their classifications for a few weeks. Next, the seventh grade class will be invited to use the library. The true test is to see if someone who was not part of the original group can readily use the library and locate a book.

Ms. Ravid’s  project engaged the students on a whole new level. As the students worked through the library project they were able to name their problem, grow their ideas and critique their ideas as a group. Why did this project work so well? Because the students made their own definitions, solved a problem and dug deeper into the material they were learning. The students were invested .They had a voice. Not only did they master the objective of the assignment by defining what each book category means, they went beyond to figure out how their own definitions need to be adjusted to accommodate books that don’t fit into any category yet. This is Design Thinking. It is always a work in progress. These are skills that will serve our students for a lifetime.