Young Innovators and Design Thinking

“Innovation comes from a problem you find fascinating” – Anne Gibbon

The Young Innovators Award is something I’ve been loosely involved with over the last few years with a couple of students in my class being eventually cajoled to submit an entry (one year we even had two finalists!) I have found it difficult to motivate boys to do more than a lastminute.com rush job and this year will try a different approach.

So it was with some enthusiasm I headed off to the launch breakfast held at Classic Flyers which not only provided a good feed and the chance to chat with other teachers, but this year they had arranged for a guest speaker followed by a teacher’s workshop. Anne Gibbon was an engaging speaker with a great back story. The opening quote was my take home message from her entertaining talk.

A new initiative this year was the teachers ‘turbo masterclass’ presented by Jono Jones. He was an energetic presenter that took us through a brief presentation of innovation and design thinking which was the underlying concept for the YIA. The great thing about this session was that were went through the design process with the challenge of how to ‘improve the staff room experience’. We went through a 5 step process:

Step 1: Brainstorm – what are some possible problems?

Step 2: Talk to people – to they reinforce your hunch? Is it a real problem?

Step 3: Set the problem – clearly articulate the problem.

Step 4: Heaps of ideas – generate some solutions.

Step 5: Turbo Makeathon – physical prototyping of a chosen solution.

So I took that task back to school, modified it and presented to students. Here is a link to my class room resource that I shared with the students – one per group. I made the mistake in the first class of not reinforcing the importance of defining the problem. The students went into a mass brainstorm of solutions – many were solutions to problems that didn’t exist. Here’s an example:

With the next class I focussed in on the problem and the student generated much better ideas. We will see if this flows through to some quality YIA projects…