How Can Student Creativity Be Cultivated With Open-ended Design Challenges? 168

How Can Student Creativity Be Cultivated With Open-ended Design Challenges?

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Looking for ways to spark student creativity during STEAM activities?

LEGO® Education and the Tufts Center for Engineering Education and Outreach (CEEO) have teamed up to co-produce Activity Briefs – easy-to-use, printable 1-page activities that inspire students to create their own solutions to open-ended challenges. Activity Briefs are based on research from Tufts CEEO on “placemat instructions”, a new kind of instructional tool for educational robotics challenges aiming to support solution diversity, a measure of creativity. This blog series will share more about placemat instructions and how you can use them in your classroom!

In this six-part series we’ll explain the “what, how, and why” of using placemat instructions in your classroom.

Here’s a sneak peek of what’s to come:

  • Part 1: Inspiring students to think and act like engineers - Learn more about the motivation for creating placemat instructions and why designing activities for solution diversity is important.

  • Part 2: What is a placemat instruction and why use it? - Get the scoop on what a placemat instruction is and how the format was intentionally designed to promote solution diversity in STEAM learning experiences.

  • Part 3: Placemat instructions in action - Read about an example of the Silly Walks placemat instruction in use with students.

  • Part 4: 3 Ways placemat instructions support teachers - Hear from other educators about how placemat instructions supported them in helping their students learn to think like engineers.

  • Part 5: How to create your own placemat instruction - In this post we’ll share some tools and tips for how to create your own placemat instruction (including a template you can use to get you started).

  • Part 6: Take it to the next level by combining sets! - Learn about the newest set of activity briefs from LEGO Education and Tufts CEEO and how they encourage the combination of the LEGO Education SPIKE portfolio with LEGO Education BricQ Motion in order to raise the ceiling on what students can create when solving an engineering design challenge.

Blog LEGO® Education Tips and Tricks 10/20/2021 9:00am EDT

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1 Comments

The link to placemat instructions seems to be broken? Im getting a “Not Found 404 error”

Thanks for letting us know! We've also updated the link in the article now as well.

Sorry about that! This link should work while we get that issue fixed 😊 https://ceeoinnovations.github.io/RoboticsPlayground/

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