Week 3 - Design Briefs, Quia games and activities

Design Briefs

We began this weeks workshop but completing a design brief and making a jumping frog using: cardboard, a rubber band, sticky tape, scissors, glue and a picture of a frog. Greg reccommendsthat we use the I/D, P, A/E format for design breifs.

Here is a screen shot of our design sheet that I filled in MS word (thanks for the template Greg).

My partner Josie and I chose to stick the frog to the cardboard and make a spring type mechanism out of the rubber band. We did this rather than sticking the cardboard to the table and creating a catapult type contraction that was the most popular design for our workshop group. The main difficulty was that the rubber band was too large, we overcame this by twisting the rubber band many times between the two sides of the cardboard (see design brief).

Here is a picture of our jumping Frog, he was a wee little ripper!

Press down on him and release to make him jump. Notice the twisted rubber band.

This would be a great activity for students to refine their scissor and fine motor skills as well as stimulate the use of their brains, not to mention the team work that was required.

On the left is a design brief template that I created for my students in my first practicum class to aid in their design of a new purpose for an old cardboard box.

Quia

Next Greg introduced us the program Quia.

Quia is according to their web site "a collection of tools for creating online content". These tools are in the form of a range of quizzes and interactive games. You can create your own based on your own content or search for already made quizzes by subject area.

Quia has the potentail to be used for the purpose of formative or summative assessment or just as a fun activity. You could assess students by having them create their own game or quiz or complete one that was created by you, or even better still students could create their own quizzes and test out the quizzes of their class mates like we did in our workshop.

This is the link to the quiz I made using Quia, it's about the capital cities of the world.
http://www.quia.com/quiz/2513873.html


I then created a hangman activity on the topic of types of pasta and sauces.
http://www.quia.com/hm/668209.html

I also created a 'pop up' activity af basic addition questions
http://www.quia.com/pop/432537.html

This week on LMS there is a whole lot of information about copywrite, cyber bullying and acceptable use. I played the game Piracy Playgound : First Adventure of the Three Cyber Pigs. This game comes with an accompanying teacher's guide and was interactive and interesting enough to help students understand when they should and should not give away their personal details or those of their families and the potential consequences for doing so.