Citizenship, Critical Thinking, Problem Solving
Real life has an interesting way of presenting opportunities that can be embedded into instruction.
This fall, I’ve done a wholesale change to my grade eight technology program. I’ve launched a course with design learning at the heart of the project. The upfront costs were significant, but not impossible for a junior high school if we proceed strategically. To date I’ve invested in a Cameo cutter (and much vinyl for the cutter), a 3-D printer, some raspberry Pi kits, a Makey Makey, Bloxels, and Ozobots coding robots.
The Cameo cutter has allowed us to begin to advertise our skills, and attempt to take some measures to recoup the cost of the consumables necessary to run an effective design program. To that end, we’ve created a Facebook page called 110 Design (My classroom is room 110, so should someone else take over the program, the advertising is easy to continue forward).
In the past month, our town has launched a new system for collecting garbage, and it involves standardized “black garbage bins” that all citizens must use. There has been a huge backlash from the residents in this town, and we struggled to make sense of the negativity. As we inspected the conversations on the local Facebook groups; it occurred to us that perhaps the underlying concern was in the potential to lose one’s garbage bin should a wind kick up. It’s a fact that our area of the province can be quite windy at times; particularly in the spring.
To take a small litmus test as to whether we were on the right track with this thought, I posted an offer on the local Facebook groups to provide small, standardized vinyl labels to be affixed to the top of the bins, for the cost of $5.00, providing the address of the residence the bin belongs to. The response was overwhelmingly positive; and requests started to flood in.
The first challenge to students was to find a means of tracking the orders. Students were presented with the challenge via Google classroom and were given the opportunity to work alone, in pairs or with a group of three.
We settled on using Google Forms, as we are a GSuite school and there is no cost to us (or to our profit margin) to utilize it to collect the information. Next we sent an email to our Mayor asking if we could present our idea to Town Council at their first available opportunity. Within an hour of sending the email, we received this response:
It reads:
Good morning Michelle. Thanks very much for your email concerning your school’s idea to help with labelling the black carts! It sounds very promising, and I’ve forwarded your request to come before council, to our Director of Legislative Services. Someone should be getting in contact with you soon. It seems like a very solid idea, and could help a great deal with people being able to recognize their own carts. Please pass along my compliments to your student group for their citizenship and forward thinking!
Thanks again, Pat.
Students are so proud to be part of the solution to a local issue, and are incredibly eager to have the opportunity to present our plans to town council, and then we will begin the process of creating and delivering. They will certainly have a challenge in monitoring which addresses are complete, and planning how we are going to collect the $5 per label from the citizens without putting pressure onto our school’s secretaries. With only having mentioned it once on the local Facebook page and once on our school’s Facebook page, we already have over 100 orders for these bin labels.
We have much more thinking yet to come!!!