A curriculum that is focused on Big Ideas helps avoid the two sins of curriculum development: a focus on activities and an emphasis on covering as much content as possible. Once the Big Ideas are established, curriculum designers can focus on the evidence needed to show students are learning the Big Ideas. Then, they can design learning activities and experiences that will lead to the desired evidence.
Creating these learning activities can be a challenging endeavor. The challenge is that teachers want a classroom that is full of students who are engaged and working collaboratively. However, they also want their classroom to be structured and supportive. These two can be tough to balance. That’s why it’s important for us that students and teachers are engaged in the design of learning activities. Not only does their involvement help us determine how to achieve the desired student learning outcomes, it helps us ensure we provide teachers with the structure and support they need.
Engaging teachers and students early in the development process goes well beyond simply collecting customer feedback. From this end, our offices have recently been a buzz of activity as we have welcomed both teachers and students to contribute to our new game: Resolvers: SOLUTIONSTEAM. As students train to become the next STEM Superhero, they learn about Computational Thinking by applying the processes of decomposition and abstraction.
As the artists and programmers create different challenges for the game’s protagonist, Wave, there is a consistent focus on the student performance that teachers will be able to gather as evidence of learning. We also know that learning activities need to adapt and change throughout the curriculum design process. This is done for the benefit of the students, who want to learn in a stimulating and engaging environment, and teachers who want to feel empowered when teaching.
As with the creating of any learning activity, there are assumptions:
- The game will be fun for students.
- Certain items in gameplay will be intuitive for students.
- Students will be motivated by the reward system to continue to explore while playing the game.
Our interdisciplinary Robomatter team works together to “build to learn” as they test these assumptions with both students and teachers. We tested our first iteration of the game after only two weeks of development. This enabled us to quickly react to the feedback we received, and make the necessary adjustments. While it might seem a little crazy to engage real-life users so early in the process, if we had waited until the game or learning activity was complete, we wouldn’t have been able to include the feedback into the final product. This is the difference between “building to learn” and most other curriculum development processes.
In a standard curriculum development process, it’s incredibly difficult to iterate and innovate with the feedback from student and teacher testing. With a standard curriculum development process, we wouldn’t be able to build on “unanticipated successes” – parts of the curriculum we didn’t expect students to enjoy so much, or things students wanted to see more of.
For example, during our first round of testing with the Resolvers: SOLUTIONSTEAM game, students were given time at the end to play and explore with the game on their own. They immediately began creating their own levels and challenges, even though the game didn’t have a “creator” mode yet. Because we engaged students so early in the process, we were able to refocus and adjust our priorities based on this feedback, which lead us to add the “creator” mode a little earlier, and make some enhancements as well. This is just one example of the benefits of “building to learn.”
As most of you know, there is nothing like sitting in a room full of 8 – 12 year olds to challenge your thinking and assumptions. Some organizations avoid this kind of feedback, but we welcome it with open arms. It’s just one small part of our dedication to agility and innovation, and the ultimate success of our STEM curriculum.
Jason McKenna, Robomatter’s Director of Global Educational Strategy, is an accomplished educational practitioner and strategist with 20 years of classroom experience and success implementing STEM programs and Robotics competitions for students at all levels.