foolfillment: the blog

Just saw this great example of using new technology to get young pupils to record experiments

Series and Parallel Circuits

Why require pupils to draw symbol-based circuit diagrams when the important information at that age is what they did and what happened?

(I really wish there was space in the timetable for some Tech Studies in 1st year and beyond at Ross…)

I saw on the last update of the Royal High School CDT Dept website* that their S1 pupils have been using a package called West Point Bridge Designer to simulate bridges, I’d not heard of this before although I’ve seen others.

Tonight I downloaded it and had a play, interestingly, for whatever reason I quickly turned from trying to faithfully re-create the Forth Bridge, to trying to get the truck that tests the bridges to fall through the floor. It must be a boy thing, this is what the RHS pupils have been doing, in particular Ryan who’s bridge was on the CDT webpage.

It was harder than it sounds, the driver of the truck is quite bright, if he thinks the bridge won’t hold his truck he won’t drive onto it. I had to tease him on with a bridge that was pretty sound until one of the very last members which I wickedly made too weak, the result:

Now I want to make a real bridge, strong enough to hold my own weight. I just have to decide on a material, I was thinking of matches and PVA but does anyone have any other (more absurd the better) ideas?

*more on this in a later post: RHS CDT page

So, I was in uni today, talking with my supervisor about my project (it’s going okay, thanks) and we got talking with the course leader, who shares the same office, about the future of subjects in CDT. More and more schools are going down the route of teaching only Craft and Design, and Graphic Communication. The point that came up was that these subjects are the ones that are (apologies if this hurts any of you) easy to teach and easy to learn. This is because essentially these courses only offer up skills, there is not really any academic aspect to them, they require pupils to learn how do perform some tasks but do not require much understanding or learning to occur.

This post is a bit of a ramble and there are no fully thought out ideas here, so feel free to chip in with your ideas of CDT, or to tell me that you disagree. It’s likely I will edit this if I get more of an idea of what I think should happen.
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Building the Curriculum is a report out recently which takes a step further along the road of the development of ACE, it includes sections about different curriculum areas, including Technologies.

This curriculum area includes creative, practical and work-related experiences and outcomes in craft, design, engineering, graphics, food, textile, and information technologies.

So my subjects then. Exciting is the mention of engineering, Technological Studies is an excellent subject taught from Standard Grade up to Advanced Higher - but only in a handful of schools. When it was introduced it fell flat on its face in the west of Scotland and only really took off in pockets along the east coast. Such was the dislike of it in the west coast that Technical departments headed up by teachers who only want to cut and glue wood actively squashed pupils’ interest anything remotely related to the subject and gave away or threw out the (expensive) equipment so that they could never be made to teach it again. Which makes me sad, kids like cutting wood and making interesting models and this is something that should continue being taught, but at the same time they are really intersted in how things work - and these would be covered in Technological Studies. Things like a basic understanding of forces, electronics, mechanisms, and programming.

These are all taught as descrete components but they all link together extremely well and there is huge scope for cross-curricular links (physics, computing, maths), as well as fun extra-curricular clubs.

But how to make it a popular course?
The first thing people need to realise is that it isn’t an easy course, too many schools use technical subjects as a dumping ground and while Craft and Design might be a suitable subject for the unenthused pupils, Tech Studies definitely isn’t.

Secondly the schools that do Tech Studies well make the kids realise that technology is exciting (building a buggy that follows a white line is cool, and easy for a third year to understand and do) but other schools teach it as a dry maths based chore. Instead of drawing endles numbers of triangles, why not actually build a bridge, or a tower? Why not build them out of materials that shouldn’t work as a way of illustrating the ideas? One of the best projects I ever did was build a tower out of spaghetti and marshmallows.
Thirdly, don’t make teachers who don’t care about it teach it. There are loads of teachers who want to make craft models all day, or just do drawing. That’s fine but don’t then make them teach programming when they haven’t got the faintest idea about it and haven’t had training for it.

Teachers are the key to successful implementation of A Curriculum for Excellence. The quality of learning and teaching in every classroom - and the inspiration, challenge and enjoyment which can come from teachers’ enthusiasm and commitment - will be critical to achieving our aspirations for all young people.

I hope I end up with the opportunity to teach Technological Studies. If I don’t I’m certainly going to get an after school club running where they build something fun and learn what a triangle is useful for.