Initial Design Reflection

Students will have more-explicit scaffolding for systems thinking in regard to their flameless heater designs during Lesson 4. So, if you notice that students have not yet connected the criterion of heating the food to two systems interacting, make note of who specifically will need support during Lesson 4 and come back to the idea then. However, you may set the stage for systems thinking by asking, What is the most important criterion for our heater? What must it be able to do to be successful? It has to heat the food. You can point out that the heater system must cause the food system to heat up.

Create a space to record what we’re doing as engineers. Designate a part of the classroom whiteboard or chalkboard or new chart paper to be the class-level What We Do as Engineers board and title it that way. Tell students, I want us to have a class record of what we’re doing as engineers so we can keep adding to this list and work to figure out what engineers do. So, when we’re working on our Progress Trackers, I’m going to record some ideas on big sticky notes, too.

Write and post large sticky notes that say “We defined our problem” and “We proposed a design solution.” Right now, these could be placed anywhere on the board or chart paper, but as we come back to this list in future lessons, we will reorganize these sticky notes to represent how engineering involves revisiting the same steps or ideas as we revise our thinking, redesign our solution, and work to optimize our design. See the example shown here.