Solar Vehicle Engineering Design Project: Day 2

The learning objective for this day was that students will be able to generate alternative design solutions by brainstorming, modeling and experimenting, and selecting preliminary designs.

Additionally, students will be able to practice effective collaboration by understanding the grading rubric and establishing communication norms with team members.

As students walked into class, I observed many of them reaching for the cabinets to pick up their supply boxes. This is a good sign! I recall my first year, one of the first true successes of the year was assigning the Rube-Goldberg Machine project, and watching students actually want to be in physics class because they were coming in early to resume their building. Since then, I've refined my approach to projects to be not only content driven, but as opportunity for students to develop collaboration and communication skills while learning the content and utilizing the engineering design process. To scaffold collaboration and communication skills for this project, I decided to assign them 10 minutes of silent reading (although I actually told them it would be 7 minutes and 42 seconds to throw them off from watching the clock). In order to clearly communicate behavior expectations, I use a system called CHAMPS... maybe separate post on another day about this. After welcoming them back to class and asking that they not pick up their boxes, I recapped from last class and explained the purpose of our time today. Doing this at the begining was especially important today because I've had several students out of class for AP testing. I reminded them of the Big Picture for this project, since each day we have so far focused on some component of this big picture. They are expected to provide me with two products as a result of their work on this project. The first product is a video--planned, recorded and edited by them as a group. How they choose to divide up the responsibilities is up to them. The second product is an interview. They are to have a one-on-one interview with me the day of their final (this is a different, earlier day for seniors). They will be asked four interview questions, and I provided them with sentences frames for starting their answers in their Engineering Report packet.

I explained the behavior expectations during this next activity using the slide  below.  My intent with this was that they understood that they were being held to high expectations that involved not only the successful building of a working prototype but also that they were able to use scientific data to justify design decisions. The rubric they were reading would have also been very easy to ignore. I recall being a total expert in ignoring the rubric and treated that page/s as just extra paper attached to my packet. The rubric had a purpose and it want students to understand that being provided the rubric is an important tool to use while planning and building their project. (I also want to inject here that I am also interested in strategies to co-create rubrics with students. I know little about how to do this but welcome any resources or feedback). Here is a PDF of the Solar Vehicle Engineering Design Project Rubric.

I gauged the crowd as they read, not only hushing any student tempted to talk but after about 6 minutes, I prompted them to skip over to the video rubric (on the last page) if they hadn't done so already. After the ten-ish minutes of silent reading, I asked them to share with a neighbor their noticings and wondering, then we debriefed as a class. One of the first smarty-pants remarks was that they notice "there are a lot of words" or "I wonder how I'll ever be able to get an A". But that led into a discussion of what kind of message I'm trying to send to them about what I expect, and assuring them that I wouldn't hold them to these standards if I didn't feel they could do it. I believe that the learning process is only successful if there is a foundation of trust between teacher and student.
Students general had similar noticings about the categories being graded or that in order to received the "advanced" grade, they needed to "exceed" expectations.
Many of the wonderings were about grades, such as if they'd be graded individually or group. I told them the video was a group grade and the interview was an individual grade.

This particular sample is from a students that is emerging bilingual. You can see his sketches for designs below his noticings and wonderings. 

After reading the rubric as a class, I transitioned the class into project time by going over the behavioral expectations for the next activity: Optimizing your design solution... which is essentially group workshop time. I invited them all to participate actively in some specific ways, namely by collaborating with their team, being 90-100% engaged, monitoring phone use and limiting to only when necessary to the project, designing and conducting experiments to collect data.

Things I noticed during this time:

• Conversations around which and how many of the gears to use and how to arrange them 
• Problem solving how to attach the axel to the rest of the car while still letting the the wheels rotate
• As per my recommendation, groups assigned a person to look up tutorials on YouTube on how to build the car. 
• Measuring and cutting base boards, cardboard, foam and card stock
• Drawings on paper and whiteboards
• about 30% of groups testing their running vehicle outside
• Recording data on mass, temperature, and force withstanding of materials (missed pictures of the students using infrared thermometers, electronic balances, and force meters w/ LabQuest 2!)
• Snapchatting

In closing, students were assigned an exit ticket. On a post it they had to write down one goal that their team had for the weekend and place the post it on either green, yellow or red to indicate if they've established communication norms. Green meant that students had exchanged phone number with all team members, yellow if they didn't have the phone numbers of some of their team members, red if they are missing the contact information for all of their team members. The picture below is not from the day we did this, but just to show the stoplight method in action. All but four students (from the same group) in the whole day posted their exit ticket on green. Some students had the goal of researching more about solar cell technology, some said they wanted to learn more about video editing tools, and most said they wanted to spend the weekend thinking about other possible designs.