In Grade 3 at River Valley School, students have been diving into DESIGN THINKING! Through this process, children work on empathy, ideating, and creating. Our recent design thinking challenge took us on an adventure in Social Studies while we explored the regions of India.
Children were put into four groups. Each group learned about a different city in India and the way people live and work in that location.
We looked at the following locations:
Srinagar (North)
Jaipur (East)
Trivandrum (South)
Calcutta (West)
Children interviewed their teachers who took on the role of being a member of that city.
After interviewing their teacher and building empathy, children had to ideate and create as many possible ideas for an article of clothing they could create to better there interviewees experience living in that city.
Once they created their ideas, the interviewee selected their favourite for the prototype creation.
Children were given newspaper, magazines, tin foil, tape, and bags to create their prototype to showcase their ideas to their classmates.
The ideas were incredible! Here are a few:
Shoes for gripping on the mountains and hills to avoid falling off when giving tours in Jaipur.
Peanut pants with infinite peanuts to help train your elephant in Trivandrum.
Gloves and flippers to help you gather lotus leaves easily in the Dal Lake in Srinagar.
Shoes with springs on the bottom to help you jump up and reach nutmeg seeds in high trees in Trivandrum.
An underwater mask that protects you from sharks if you fall off the boat when fishing in Calcutta. The sharks lose their teeth if they bite the mask.
These were just a few of the incredible creations our students came up with during this process. A special thanks for the STEM Learning Lab for sharing DESIGN THINKING with us! Our imaginations are truly taking us on adventures in Grade 3 and we LOVE IT!
Until next time…
~ Miss Kim