Watch: Oreo-making Video

Group size: 4-5 students
Activity time: 20 minutes

‍Created by: Cindy Atman

“Oreo-making Video” is part of the Design Activities resource, which compiles activities that students can use to practice and reflect on design processes.

In “Oreo-making Video”, students will work in teams to view Bon Appetit’s video, “Pastry Chef Attempts To Make Gourmet Oreos”, and track the pastry chef’s design process to gain a better understanding of what design process tracing looks like. 

We invite you to choose a capture method from the Capturing Design Signatures collection. Using a capture method, this activity gives students the opportunity to reflect on what the pastry chef does, and notice how they make choices and move through their design process. 

The following capture methods work well for this activity:

• Bubble sheets: This bubble sheet helps students track their design process by pen and paper, by “bubbling in” the dot for the corresponding time and design process stage.
• Google forms survey: This Google Forms survey helps students track their design process by filling in checkboxes in a survey.
• Spreadsheet: This spreadsheet helps students track their design process by coloring in cells for the corresponding time and design process stage. Designed to support asynchronous data collection for longer projects.

The purpose of this activity is to allow students to engage in watching, analyzing, and reflecting on someone else’s design process. Through this activity, students will see the pastry chef's design process, and they may learn how design appears in all aspects of daily life. Additionally, with a capture method, this activity teaches students a form of qualitative coding. 

This activity will help students:

• Practice design awareness
• Learn qualitative coding and observational skills
• See design in other places—like oreos!

• A device that is capable of streaming a video (phone, laptop, tablet)
• A capture method 
• Optional, if your class is virtual: a platform for screen-sharing. 

1. Send the link to this oreo-making video to your students.

1. Have each team set up the capture method you’ve chosen, as well as a blank note-taking document. 
2. Have teams watch one minute of the video. (If in-person, you may choose to stream the video yourself for the entire class to see.)
3. After the minute, go back and watch the same minute again, but this time in 10 second intervals. For each 10 second interval, teams should pause and write down a short description of what happened in those 10 seconds. 
4. After they finish rewatching that minute interval, teams will label each description with one of the design process stages. (This is also known as qualitative coding.) Teams can then record each 10 second segment using their capture method. 
5. Repeat steps 2 and 3 for the entire video; rewatch sections as necessary. 
6. Have each team view the pastry chef’s design process tracing, and engage in a 5 minute discussion about their process. The following questions may be used: some text
   1. How does the data help you understand the pastry chef’s process? 
   2. From this process, what behaviors helped the pastry chef? What changes might you advise the pastry chef to make? 
   3. What interesting things happened as the pastry chef attempted to problem-solve and try again? 
7. Have each team share their reflections to the class.