foolfillment: the blog

I’ve said this before, but in introducing 2 year Highers at Ross High there is scope to move from teaching the course as a ‘two term dash’ to having time to further explore the parts of the courses that otherwise get glossed over or missed altogether. In the Product Design course the pupils spend their 4th year working through whole projects and then making the product.

We are getting towards the end of the first project now and my thoughts are turning to how it is to be assessed. In a normal Higher you teach some content then assess with a NAB, a centrally set test. In this project though the aim wasn’t to pass an Outcome, but what was it? Sure, there are some aims like gain an understanding of vacuum forming, develop a better understanding of the design process, but looking back I wonder how well as a department we have shared these intentions with the classes - I know I haven’t done this particularly well. And what about specific Learning Outcomes?

Then thinking about how to assess the projects I’m pretty keen to get the pupils involved. A big part of the Product Design course (and design generally) is to analyse and evaluate existing stuff, so to me it makes absolute sense that the pupils should evaluate each other’s designs and folios. It would also steer them away from wanting a grade.

Having posted a week or so ago about trying to get my 4th years to be a bit more creative, my efforts have come around to bite me.

With Standard Grades being sat at the end of 3rd year at Ross High it gives us a whole 2 years to cover the higher courses. So far this is showing some good and some bad points. One of the good things to come out of it in the CDT department is the chance to overhaul the structure of some courses. In Product Design for instance we are giving the pupils the chance to be a lot more hands on and to actually make some of the things they design. This is great because the pupils get to see their designs right through from brief to manufacture and evaluation, it also makes sure they have to take the development of ideas through its full cycle and leave no details uncertain.

However that is causing some small headaches. The project they are currently working on is to design a promotional radio. The pupils are to design the radio and then create a pattern around which plastic will be vacuum formed, then they wire up a radio kit and mount it inside their plastic shell.

The class have come up with some really creative forms, the trouble is finding a way to create the pattern that the plastic will be formed around. The original idea had been that the form of the radios would be simple extruded shapes, and we’d be able to make the pattern from some timber or MDF - no such luck, I’ve tried to put together a rough model of one idea, I’ve probably simplified it:

This afternoon I posted this image on pownce asking for any advice on how to make it and Ian quickly came up with some good ideas. Of course that is exactly the sort of conversation that the pupils could have benefited from being involved in or even better, leading - my task is to get them set up on pownce sometime in the next fortnight or so.

The link above to my pownce post won’t work unless you have an account and are marked as my friend, but I have invites left if you want one.

I’m curious, I ask questions, I look at things and I wonder. I’m trying to get my 4th year Product Design class to do similarly.

Today we were looking at where they might get some inspiration for a radio they are designing. One of my favourite designers for getting conversations started is Phillipe Starck. The man is, quite simply, out of his tree. His work always elicits opinion. One thing I tried today towards the end of the lesson - out of my own curiosity - was to show them a picture of Starck’s Torche radio and get them to write down without discussion where they thought he might have got his ideas from.

I’d like to try it again here: without looking through any comments take a look at the image below and then try to think of an object, shape, motion, idea, or anything else that you think Starck might have had in mind when designing this radio. Once you have something skip to the bottom add a comment saying what you think his inspiration might have been. Then you can have a look to see what others saw in it - I expect most of you will have different answers.

In other news I’m a little disappointed that foolfillment didn’t make it into a list of 45 great blog designs - they must just not know about me yet (via Ewan’s delicious - everything I talk about at the moment seems to have come from there).

Chris Munro is a teaching fellow at the Aberdeen University Faculty of Education, involved with their equivalent of Glasgow Uni’s BTechEd. Until fairly recently he was still teaching in tech departments, he is also involved with the SQA.

I think time was getting a little tight so not the presentation it might have been.

The majority of the presentation was an overview of how Inventor and other modelling software can be used with the Product Design course. He worked through the three units and referenced the work he was showing against the Arrangement Documents. Starting off by explaining that when the course was being put together initially there was a vocal minority who wanted to make 3D modelling a much bigger part of the course than it is, they were challenged by the majority, including those representing industry. This formed the basis for his presentation - that Product Design has to be about creative design and not using fancy tools to create good presentation images.

Some of his examples of pupil work showed this brilliantly, the one that stood out to me was a sofa that had been sketched by hand, had gone through a reasonable design process, but in the final sheet of images the sofa bore very little resemblance to their other designs - presumably because they didn’t have the skills to model it as they had designed it. Somewhere along the way they or their teacher had decided that they should put in some 3d modelling because it would get them marks. It didn’t.

I don’t actually have much more to say than that, the overall presentation was pretty good - it’s nice to hear how the course was dreamt up and then to see how other teachers have interpreted the Arrangements. It was particularly useful for me as I’ve never had the chance to see Product Design being taught, it’s a big gap in my knowledge - possibly to change soon…

I didn’t take any notes for this presentation, so I’m relying on my memory and the over-riding thought is that it was fairly positive about the future by showing how not to do the course - the main point being to consider using 3D modelling to add worth to the designs rather than using it just because it’s there, I’d love to hear what other people thought.