Kinder Toy Design Project

In December my design studies students and I travelled to do real field research with a kindergarten class. Seeing high school students paired up with little ones was a cool experience. I had this crazy idea and I wanted it to turn into an opportunity for my students. I've also started to develop the course as we go along on my class wiki, where you will also find other "personal projects". All are considered a work in progress!

Our Visit
They spent an hour talking with the Kindergarten students interviewing them to get ideas for our class final project. The class final project is to design a wind up walker toy for their tiny partners. From robots to dolls to christmas trees, the kindergarten students had amazing ideas for toys- they are are experts in this field after all.

Shoot Everything! 
If there's one thing that I can recommend to teachers out there is to take more video or photos of your students in action! It does a couple of things for me when I'm shooting video/pictures. First, it helps me get around to every student in the class. The loud ones sometimes get our attention whether they need it or not. Second, it allows you to document the awesome things that are happening in your class. Be proud of your students' work and share it so others can draw ideas from it. Additionally, when I take pictures of student work in my media arts class of their designs I tell them that I want to take a picture so I can share it because it's the right thing to do. Essays generally only get read by the teacher, 'scantrons' of multiple choice tests don't look very good on the walls, but pictures of students' iPod models or keychains are great for me to tweet out and share!

Here's an look at our class in action working with the wee ones. Blogger sucks at embedding the video so click on it and watch it in it's HD glory!

This post is a bit late, but it was a great experience to work with younger students. I'm really proud of how all students in my class were amazing when working with 5 year olds. They got down on the floor, sat in the little chairs and were heroes!