Category Archives: Design Thinking

posted on May 4, 2020

intooba construction kits for K-6. The benefits of using physical kits for mathematics and engineering in elementary and middle school are:

  • students can learn the vital skills of collaboration, listening, and expressing/explaining their opinions;
  • students learn that they may need to attempt to solve problems multiple times in order to meet the requirements of the problem;
  • students use their hands and minds in construction thereby giving a visual and practical application to math and engineering;
  • teachers can “see” how children are thinking by observing how they construct their engineering/building challenges;
  • teachers can see how children are working together and expressing themselves in collaborative project work.

https://www.intooba.com/

Elementary engineering
posted on April 8, 2020

CREATIVE FREE PLAY

This house design is an engineering marvel created by two 11-year-old students without any adult input whatsoever!

The structure was created in two parts – base and top.

Congratulations to these two budding engineers!

www.intooba.com

CONSTRUCTING CREATIVITY – intooba construction kits

Housing base
Housing top
Complete house
posted on July 2, 2018

Spiraling through the many years of a K-12 education are various levels of math, language, writing, social studies, the sciences, and the traditional topics we expect in such an environment. The education community is pushing towards STEM/STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Math – with the inclusion of Art) with the realization that the space in which students will eventually be employed has changed dramatically. Not only has the environment changed with advances in technology, globalization, access to information, social and political change, and environmental challenges, but the pace of change is increasing. We are now trying to integrate the disciplines with a view to increased creativity through cross-discipline pollination. Is this enough? Are we fulfilling our essential and critical responsibility in providing opportunities to enable our children to operate successfully in this environment?

Essential features in education looking forward should include:

• learning to correctly and accurately find, describe, and solve complex challenges
• attaining the skills required to work successfully in groups
• the ability to welcome and work through adjustments, modifications, and failures
• demonstrating to students the practical applications of their classroom learning

To these ends, we at Blue Egg Advisory Group LLC have invented and developed a unique manipulative to foster these concepts in young learners (K-6) as they prepare for secondary school and beyond. Our INTOOBA Construction Kit manipulative offers many opportunities for hands-on experimentation through leveled curriculum manuals in math and engineering.

http://intooba.com

posted on March 17, 2016

Boulder Center for Interactive Learning at Dawson (BCILD), in collaboration with Dawson School, has just completed a comprehensive Design Thinking project. To those K-12 educators interested in using Design Thinking in schools, we hope that you find this report interesting and useful.