Peer Feedback on

7.A.1 Respectfully provide and receive critiques about design solutions to evaluate competing designs with respect to how they meet criteria and constraints and consider patterns across multiple designs to determine which design characteristics caused more-effective outcomes in performance.

• Students cite evidence to support the performance of different design characteristics.
• Students are able to support any claims they make with evidence and reasoning.
• Students are asking questions to elicit details important to meeting the criteria and constraints.
• Students also have the opportunity to respond to clarifying questions.
• Students identify design features that cause more-effective outcomes in the performance of their MRE.

What to do

• If students are struggling to back up their ideas with evidence, direct them to Design Testing Matrix.
• Students should also be encouraged to ask clarifying questions that reveal underlying reasons for how particular characteristics performed.

If students give feedback such as “sounds good” or “unclear,” ask the receiver if the feedback will help them improve their design or if more specifics would be helpful. Students will likely share that this more-general feedback is not extremely helpful but that more-specific feedback about what was good or what parts were unclear would help them improve their designs. This exchange will help students give more-productive feedback and critique to their peers.

When you question students, use questions such as “What design feature do you think caused the MRE to perform as it did?” or “What pattern do you identify in these tests that is similar and how did that cause the MRE prototype to perform the way it did?” Emphasizing the cause-and-effect relationship that students identify by seeing patterns in the data is the CC emphasized in this lesson.

Begin a discussion by asking, Can someone share a design characteristic they saw or heard about from a partner team that they'd like to try in their team’s design or that they think might improve the performance of their team’s design?

Some examples may include the following:

Design characteristic

What was promising?

What were the trade-offs?

Why was it effective?

• Reactants were in a cylinder that food surrounded.
• This really helped it get to a high temp (49ºC), but it pushed the cost over $3.
• It maximizes contact between reactants and food.
• They used all-glass containers.
• It held the temperature for a long time and didn’t use that many reactants to get to temperature.
• The glass insulated the heat so that the energy couldn’t be transferred out.

They used all plastic.

• This made the design lightweight, but heat transferred away from the food to the environment too quickly.
• Lightweight materials would make the homemade heaters easier to carry and allow more weight to be used for food or reactants.
• The amount of food was 150 grams.
• This made less food to heat up, but it might not be enough food to fill everyone up.
• Less food to heat up means that less energy transfer is required from the heater system to the food system.
• Images were included with each step of the instructions.
• This helped us understand the how-to instructions a lot better but will take time to do. It might push up the cost of instructions.
• Visual images will work for any language that people use. Also, a visual helps communicate details that words cannot easily describe.

Keep track of promising ideas for design characteristics on the chart paper and help students connect to the criteria and constraints on Design Testing Matrix by asking which criterion or constraint(s) the design characteristic addressed as they share. Highlight patterns by asking students to identify them as teams share ideas. As they identify patterns, encourage them to identify design characteristics that caused the design to perform well or meet the criteria.

After each team has an opportunity to share, review the chart and engage students in a discussion using the example dialog below.

Suggested prompts

Sample student responses

Follow-up questions

Did we address all of our criteria and constraints?

Yeah, most of them.

Which ones do we have promising ideas for?

Do we have a promising idea for cost?

Yes, one team cut costs by using an oatmeal bowl!

What other…