These design activities include tower-building team projects and reflection on design awareness. The activities enable your students to enact a design process and also reflect on it.
We invite you to pair these with a capture method from the Capturing Design Signatures collection. Capture methods are a way to capture the design process, so that students can see a visual representation of their process. Since we created these activities alongside capture methods, our instructions describe ways to use a capture method with them.
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Project: Marshmallow TowerSubject area: Design awareness, design process
Activity type: Teamwork, physical build
Groups: 4-5 students
Activity time: 45 minutes
Project: Balloon CarSubject area: Design awareness, design process
Activity type: Teamwork, physical build
Groups: 4-5 students
Activity time: 45 minutes
Project: Soccer World CupSubject area: Design awareness, design process
Activity type: Teamwork, physical build
Groups: 4-5 students
Activity time: 25 minutes
Project: Oreo TowerSubject area: Design awareness, design process
Activity type: Teamwork, physical build
Groups: 3-4 students
Activity time: 20 minutes
Watch: Oreo-Making VideoSubject area: Design awareness, design process
Activity type: Video
Groups: 4-5 students
Activity time: 20 minutes
Coming soon! Water Bottle Tower and Pipe Cleaner Tower
The Design Signatures in the Wild group began meeting in early 2023. These meetings started as a way for these educators to share the resources they use for their work, overlapping engineering and design, and to brainstorm ways to move forward. They shared a common goal to promote design awareness and reflectiveness in their engineering students.
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