Claire Wood and a year 8 student talk about unpacking examples of technologists' practice to grow curriculum understandings.
Growing knowledge beyond students' practice
Transcript
Claire Wood: I think it’s really important to teach out of practice so that the students have a really deep understanding of some of the components. For example, my year eights have been doing a fabric organiser as their project, and we’ve been talking about functional modelling and the two components that we’re really focusing on is brief development and functional modelling.
And so I used Kate Middleton who was in the country when I was teaching about brief development and I used one of her dresses and I asked the class what would the specifications have been to her designer in order to get a dress that she wore to Government House. And so the students could then apply their knowledge of brief development to that, and so that was outside of their practice.
And also, functional modelling is really important to do outside of practice so that the kids realise that people in business have to do functional modelling to make sure that they get a really good end product.
Student: So we looked at other technologists and their functional modelling. Like Dyson, he had to make 5,127 models, and they wouldn’t necessarily all be of the whole prototype, they would be parts of it. So, it could be the handle for example, and they would have needed to work on that maybe, because it wasn’t as good.
And also, if you were a high, if you were a high standard company, let’s say Apple, and you wanted to keep your standard very high, then you’d want to make a lot of prototypes and models about the ones that you needed to work on. So it could be the keypad or something that you needed to get your standards up.
So we looked at cars and they had to be aerodynamic, and they would make the car out of clay, and then they would make the specific parts out of the proper metal. I think that the car manufacturers model out of clay because it’s not as expensive and you can do much more with it to get the shape that you want and get the right fit for the parts that you need. After we looked at Dyson, we would put that into our own organisers, so we would look at what we could work on.
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