Engineering Design Process: Plan

“I drew… because…” “I don’t agree with that, because…” “My idea was…”

Invite students to share the part of their imagined designs that they think is most important and give evidence for why it meets the criteria and constraints. Ask students to explain why all their ideas cannot work—perhaps they could? Press the students to explain their thinking based on evidence from activities in the Ask phase. Be intentional about grouping students before any activity. Group students who have complementary skill sets. Having a student in the group who shows good leadership or mediation skills can help move the group past using all the ideas to one that best meets solves the problem.

Both students use gestures, speak in their shared home language, and model the supply case with available materials to demonstrate how it would work. One student shares her ideas, and the other builds off of her idea to improve it.

Learning to collaborate helps students develop interpersonal skills and helps them in their social and emotional development. Communicating and collaborating with different students throughout the year can help students develop diverse perspectives on problem-solving, helping them develop their 21st-century skills. Collaboration in engineering also helps emergent multilingual learners to practice speaking, writing, reading, and listening in a contextualized way.

Students will only create and test one design, so they need to come to a consensus on what that design is. Encourage students to use the evidence from the Ask phase to determine which features from each student’s Imagine phase designs they want to include.

The students provide findings from their testing and the scientific information to support their claim—longer suspension lines allow the canopy to open more, which lets more air inside and creates more drag. To further convince their teammate, students could have offered a comparison: “When we tested the suspension lines, X length was slower to fall than Y length, so we should use X length.”

Ask the student who is convinced it will work why he thinks that. In this video, we only see the second student share their critique of the design. Ask that student to share something that might change the existing design to make it meet the goal of the design challenge. Consider having all teams share their designs with other classmates to get feedback. This may help highlight other failure points a team may not have thought of on their own. It also gives teams a chance to see multiple ideas for solving the problem and generate new ideas for their own design.

Evidence from Ask phase activities could give students data and scientific knowledge to use as reasoning in their discussions. The Ask phase provides students with an understanding of materials and their properties they can use in their designs. This shared familiarity makes discussions easier for students, as they have a shared knowledge base. They can also build on that base by bringing in their own experiences with materials from outside the engineering classroom. Imagining ideas separately would create multiple ideas that the students could draw from as they determine a plan. If one component in the knee brace system doesn’t work, they will have other ideas to draw from.