Kindergarten Little Red Riding Hood Design Challenge

In kindergarten I like to do a design challenge around a fairy tale. During this challenge we talk about the elements of the story and I introduce students to the ideas of the design process including brainstorming, ideate and prototyping. This year we read the story of Little Red Riding Hood.

Each year I start with a fairy tale because most of my students have heard them before. I feel that this familiarity with the story helps them to move into the story mapping and the design challenge. Before I start the story I talk to the class about looking at the setting of the story and where the beginning, middle and end of the story takes place. Then we read the story together as a class. Next we map out the story. We drew where the beginning, middle and end of the story takes place. That is our first lesson time.

The next week I have the students recall and retell the story and we map the beginning, middle and end again on the whiteboard. Then I introduce the design challenge. I tell the students that Little Red wants to be able to continue to visit her grandmother’s house and it is our challenge to come up with a safer way for her to get from her house to her grandmother’s house. I pull out large maps of our story along with legos and keva blocks and students start building their ideas. Next we share out what they built, they included cars, boats, trains, ziplines and teleportation stations. As students are sharing I start to put their ideas into categories.

The next lesson we recall and retell the story again. Then I share what categories their ideas fit into. This year we had four categories vehicles, fences, bridges and traps. I decided to introduce the students to 3D printing for this project. We have two 3D printers in the library that are always going and the students are amazed by them whenever they are in the library. The students were placed in small groups with a teacher and were given one of the four categories to design a prototype that would help Little Red. Working with the 3D printing software Tinkercad, students (with the help of the teacher) designed and created 3D prototypes using different 3D shapes. They can up with some amazing ideas! Some were fences that had security cameras and lasers, traps that looked like grandma’s house to trick the wolf and a double decker taxi bus because Little Red can’t drive yet.

We then made a movie explaining the process that students went through and shared their final prototype designs at an all school assembly.