A “solution” to a design process task is likely not unique. There might be a variety of successful solutions with different ones working well under different circumstances. This process is intended for a world that is complex and that might not tolerate simple answers!
The (engineering) design process
The careful reader hopefully noticed that the title of this article has the word engineering in brackets! The design process presented in the new curriculum and described here is used by many professionals beyond engineers; basically by anyone in the business of carefully designing something. In fact, this is how I develop new lessons for science, using an iterative process involving repeated planning, testing, and evaluating. I appreciate the enthusiasm of the curriculum writers to highlight engineering, but I think it is more valuable to emphasize the wide range of people who use this problem-solving process. A design team will have many members with various skills and backgrounds, possibly even including an engineer if the task is sciency!
Designing a design process activity
There is a good chance this process is quite new to you and is wrapped in mystery; maybe even inside an enigma. Fear not! I will soon share with you some design process tasks that I have developed for grade 9 science. A design task does not have to be a long, complex project. It can be a fun, one-day activity with no marking for the teacher! But it can also be a rich, multi-day task that students will remember for a long time. Before I share activities that I have created, let's think about how you can transform what you are already doing into a design task.
(1) Choose a building task. Think of what you are already doing in your science course. Do you have any activities where students build something? Maybe it's currently a small part of a lesson. For example, at the start of our grade 9 course we do a cardboard boat building activity as part of a density lesson.
(2) Add the design process structure. If you ask a group of students to “go build something”, they will most likely randomly start grabbing materials and glomming it together with one student doing most of the building and others watching. To avoid this, add structure to your task. Don't let students grab materials until they develop their first plan and check it with you. Ask them to make notes for each plan, the test results, and ideas for improvements. This can be done formally on paper or quickly on a whiteboard. My boat-building activity has a planning and testing step that are done just once, so I could expand this to include full, repeating cycles.
(3) Group size and task complexity. If the task has a lot of structure or things for multiple students to do (the chemistry task I will share is an example of this) a group of four can work well. Simpler tasks are better suited to pairs of students, otherwise some will find themselves in the role of spectator rather than participant. Returning to my boat-building task: students are able take turns with the construction while they individually complete their investigation page, so the usual four students of our groups work fine but pairs might actually be better.
(4) Prior knowledge and the first cycle. If students have useful prior knowledge to apply, the planning phase of the first cycle can be very valuable. If not, the first planning phase can be a waste of time and a discouraging step in the design process. In the latter case, it is better for students to work with the materials right away so they can learn about them and then build and test their first product as soon as possible. My boat building activity illustrates this problem: many students don't have experience working with cardboard and masking tape to produce something that floats. Many of their boats have comically obvious holes and gaps; they are doomed to sink immediately with disappointing results (they currently only build once)! If instead, the first step in the activity was to quickly build and test a simple boat, students would swiftly learn that they need to tape up all the gaps or create a boat with a more stable shape. They could then come up with a better-informed design in a second cycle, which my students currently do not do.
So adding some structure and multiple attempts to an existing construction task can turn it into a good design process activity. I should improve my boat activity!
Design tasks for grade 9 science
The new curriculum conveniently does not provide examples of design tasks for grade 9. In a presentation by ministry education officers, they mentioned that the design tasks should be part of the four major units, as opposed to more general content-independent task. There is one criterion that I think is critical for choosing a good design task for science: the task should require students to apply or develop core content knowledge from their science class. This probably sounds reasonable but is challenging to pull off! This semester I developed two tasks for grade 9 science that I will share with you. I also have examples from grade 11 and 12 physics where we have been doing design tasks for many years.
Light for education
Here is a design task suitable for the grade 9 electricity unit. As an introduction, take a moment to interpret this graph:
