Innovation: A year (so far) with Imaginative Inquiry Part 4: Design Challenge

This is the next installment of my documentation of using Imaginative Inquiry with my third grade students. You can see the first three posts on my blog, (Intro, Part 2, Part 3). Now that my students had completed the research part of their mission to look into innovation and birch bark canoes and how that connected to their classroom studies of the Ojibwe People, they were ready to take what they had learned and see if they could connect it to design.

The next communication students received from Agent X was a large box filled with materials and another letter with instructions about their mission. This mission was a design challenge! Students were asked to think about what they had learned about the birch bark canoe. The canoe was a simple construction using limited materials and was sturdy enough to carry supplies and people across waterways but also light enough to be carried on one person’s back. The students were challenged to make a birch bark inspired canoe, on a much smaller scale. Using the materials in the box, birch bark paper, craft sticks and rubber cement, could the students design and make a model of a birch bark canoe that could float?

There are couple of links to this project beyond the study of birch bark canoes, this also connected to the goal of helping students cultivate their collaboration and communication skills. Students were working in small groups and would need to design and plan together, coming to an agreement of the final plan and work together to build with the materials and if need redesign the canoe to make it float. This part of the project also connected to the buoyancy study they were doing in science. It is always great for students when there are multiple connections to the work they are doing in other areas can be reinforced. This makes the concepts more concrete for students and they are more likely to remember the information and concepts.

Students embraced the design challenge and jumped right into the planning. They were reminded to make sure their design was connected to what they had learned about the design of the canoes by the Ojibwe. They did a great job managing their collaboration and communications with each other and did not require many teacher mediations. The highlight of this part of the project was how excited students were to test their designs and how proud they were when their canoes floated.

The final step to close out our study of birch bark canoes was for students to reflect on some of the challenges and struggles they encountered while trying to build their canoes and the appreciation they gain for how innovative the birch bark canoe was and what a great technological design it was hundreds of years ago.

Next up… collaboration, communication connected to coding and robots!