Lesson Starters: Good Design

I only see my Design students for two 90 minute lessons a week, but I want to expose them to endless amounts of excellent design! I've come up with a few ways to do this, including extra-curricular quests (in ClassCraft) and through bringing in interesting objects for them to look at (including in my first class of the year).

Some  interesting objects I bought in recently are my rug, made from plastic bottles from the ocean and my new bag, made of a recycled bounce house/bouncy castle! As well as a Lucky Iron Fish and a Right Cup!

Students seem to really enjoy learning about this objects, as they are never what they expect, and they like the play involved with guessing. Students are so used to me bringing in strange objects, that the other day a student would not believe that my brooch did not have a hidden meaning. He came up to me in the hall and said 'what's that about'....and then was very disappointed when I told him it was just pretty..

I also often end my lessons by showing students cool design, interesting videos....and often music videos from around the world, or ones that the students are requested. This creates a fun culture in the classroom and students seem to be pretty excited to see how these things.

Although there is change over time between every class, I always have students arriving at different times, so have started putting up activities on my board for them to do, while other students arrive. Sometimes these are interesting photos from the news and sometimes they are games, like Boggle! However, I have been meaning to put together some photos of cool designs to kick off my classes. I recently popped home to London and went to the Design Museum to see the Beazley Design Awards exhibition, and knew I needed to share lots of these cool items with my students!

Anyway - here you go - to use this presentation show the first image on the board, and as students come in they can guess what it is, and then when everyone arrives, you can reveal it's purpose!

ENJOY! Let me know what else I should add!