So what is an Image board?

One way of thinking about people or places we are designing for is by creating an image board. This is a collection of pictures taken from all kinds of places to help us understand what things we need to be considering to develop are understanding of the school carpark.

We will begin making this tomorrow when we meet. Please also remember that you all will need to give me your email address so that you can all begin creating your own posts. Callum, James and Sufia you have already done this.

Identifying a school or a community need

How do we decide what a really important problem to solve as Engineers? We have asked our teachers, our lovely caretaker Mrs F and other children around the school. We have organised these ideas in order of importance and decided to look at the carparking issue. The staff carpark is for the teachers and other adults that work at the school. We have learned by talking to people around the school that sometimes problems are created when the carpark gets used to drop children off at school. The staff carpark is not very big for a primary school that has lots of children attending. The carpark does not really have a great gate which has been making the budding Future Engineering group think.

Yvette was at school bright and early on Wednesday and took the following photos at 8.30am which is when most children are being dropped off.

Busy, busy, busy!

Red traffic cones and a simple metal gate is currently used to prevent entry into the carpark from 8.30am -9am.

The simple metal gate is open before this times which can been that cars slip through and take up parking spaces and then leave after the gates open.

NOW THE BIG QUESTIONS  - HAVE WE COLLECTED ENOUGH INFORMATION TO BEGIN DESIGNING A BRIEF TO SOLVE THIS? clue: Do you think other schools would have a similar problem?IS THIS REALLY THE MOST IMPORTANT PROBLEM TO BE LOOKING AT?

You all need to post a comment to the questions above.

Our goals for this week.

Goals are pretty important when it comes to learning. Goals help by breaking down big learning into tiny steps that we can all be successful at. One of Whaea Ara's big goals for our group is to get us recording our own learning in this space.

Our goal for this week is to post a comment on this blog

The steps we need to take are

1. GOTO http://www.engine-neering.blogspot.com/
2. CLICK ON the sign in button on the right hand side of the blog.
3. MAKE a google email account so that you can post a comment. ASKING an adult here to help you is a good idea.
4. SIGN IN to your google account on the blog and FOLLOW the instructions to POST a comment.

REMEMBER to use only a first name as your username.

When we have been able to post a comment we will have achieved our goal for the week. Yeh!

A special mention to Kern who brought in some research on ways of getting in and out of carparks. Good Job.

FEEDBACK
Well done to Callum, Sufia, James, Yvette, and Kern for successfully being able to post a comment. Yeh!
Deanna you have nearly cracked it!

Future Engineering

Engineer's are pretty amazing people. They use their imagination and problem solving skills to invent, design, and build things that matter. We are learning that everything around us has been engineered in someway.

After lots of brainstorming as to what we should call ourselves, Sarah came up with Future Engineering. Because, we are the future.

EVERYONE please post a comment on a type of Engineering you can remember and give an example.
There are lots to choose from.
For example: Chemical Engineers can work on making better paint and plastic.

Organising our ideas

We started by organising the idea's without speaking into an Engineering and non Engineering column.
It was tricky as we all just wanted to speak. We were then able to talk and decid what we thought the most
important idea's were. We used a PMI grid (positives, minuses, Interesting facts) to help us.

REMEMBER - when you post a comment, write a draft in microsoft word. Check that your spelling and punctuation are correct. Also read your work to make sure that it makes sense and edit as necessary.

Going it alone

Sometimes we are going to have to meet together ourselves because we will only see Whaea Ara once a week. We had been left with two instructions
What do we want to be called?
Have we got any idea's of problems of our own?

Deanna please post a comment on what we do, when you either forget to come or cannot come to the group.

So how do you come up with a problem to solve?

This is an interesting question. We need to come up with a problem where teachers, students and engineers work together to meet a need, problem or opportunity in the school or local community. We thought a good idea would be to ask others in the school. Each person was asked two questions.
1. Do you have a problem we could solve to help make things better for our school or community?
2. How could solving this problem make things better?

Please post one idea each that you collected.

Working as a team

We are a group of Year 5 children who will be working together this year to help find a solution to a problem that will benefit our school or community. We will be entering the Transpower Neighbourhood Engineering awards.Whaea Ara will be helping us work through this.We are Sarah, Thomas, Callum, Yvette, Kern, Sufia, James and Deanna. Because we are from different classes, the first thing we had to do before we could anything else was to come up with some team rules. It is important that we listen and respect each others ideas and not leave everything up to one or two people in the team. We will be recording our learning by using this blog and learn how to use some cool web 2.0 tools along the way. http://www.befunky.com/ has been used to create the cartoon effect you see above.