Design Is Elementary

The Vermont Design Institute offers visiting architects and ecological designers to work with your classroom teachers and students. Programs may range from a slide show to hands-on building activities.

Introducing design activities to children is a natural extension of their creative and physical development which grows out of observation skills, applied problem-solving, and hands-on activities.

Physical development skills include:

• Hand-eye coordination through painting or model-making
• Seeing and observing through sketching, drawing, and surveying
• Listening through interviews and storytelling

Intellectual development includes:

• Spatial thinking by forming the connection between two-dimensional drawing and three-dimensional building
• Understanding complexity by comparing the interplay between "form" and "function"
• Creative problem-solving by visualizing solutions to sets of parameters in a given design problem
• Developing sensitivity to dunamic situations by understanding changing perspectives and conditions

The following activities can be used at different levels of complexity depending on the age or interest to develop critical-thinking, problem-solving, and technical development. Or, just plain to delight in our human ability to develop creative solutions to a stated problem. They range in duration from one 50-minute class time to several classes in length, from personal to community in perspective, and from urban to rural in context.

Sample Activities:

1. Designing Dream Houses
2. What holds up the Paint? A Look at your School
   
3. Your Neighborhood
4. Life in a Mayonnaise Jar
5. Minnie & Freddie: An EcoDesign Project
6. Future City

Activities:

• Life in a Mayonnaise Jar
• Neighborhood Survey: a Community Project
• What holds up the Paint? Looking beyond the Surface at your School
• Minnie and Freddie: an Eco-design Project

Project: Life in a Mayonnaise Jar
If folks are actually going to do this, they aften want to put a fish in there. This usually works well BUT NOT TIL there has been a chance for the algae to equilibrate in there. Best not to seal the jar until it has been sitting on a sunny windowsill for a few days, maybe more like a week is better. That gives time for the algae to start pumping out oxygen.

Concept
To build a conceptual understanding of the interdependence and connectivity of life on Earth

Part One: DRAWING description
Have students imagine a mayonaise jar and what they would need to live inside this closed system.

Give each student a large sheet of paper and set of markers or crayons to draw with. Have them begin by drawing a large mayo jar in the middle of the paper–taking up most of the page. Make sure it has a lid on it.

Next have the students think about what they would take with them to live in this space for a week, a month, a year... how might these differ depending on the length of time? When they have all had a chance to reflect and draw, pin the drawings on the wall.

Compare and contrast what students included in their drawings. Talk about how the Earth is a closed system similar to the closed mayonnaise jar and how our actions interconnect with others on the planet.

Materials
Large sheets of paper, colored markers or crayons

Part Two: BUILD Description
Bring in a large commercial size mayonnaise jar for students to build a small ecosystem in. Visit or bring in water to fill the jar from a nearby pond, stream, or shoreline. It should contain some muck as well as enough water to fill the jar. Close lid tightly and put jar in the sun. Within two weeks life should be growing within the medium.

Materials
Large commercial size mayonnaise jar (empty and clean)

Project: What Holds Up the Paint? Looking Beyond the Surface at Your School
Observation can occur on many levels–from subtle clues to the obvious. We use all our senses–touching, smelling, tasting, seeing and hearing. While we think of seeing as our major source of information for understanding the environment (both natural and man-made)—recognizing our friends, our way around the neighborhood, a beautiful view, a treacherous mountain path, etc.—all our senses are at work. We might use our sense of smell to find the bakery or avoid a smelly dumpster. Sound works the same way, it tells us the size and character of a space–whether it’s a forest, a classroom, or your bedroom. These observations help us understand our surroundings. Our analysis and preferences turn them into decision-making tools.

Project: What holds up the Paint? A Look at your School
What do we know about our school and where it sits within the community, or within the rest of the world for that matter? How does our school building influence our surroundings, our neighborhood? How is our school part of our daily life? What do we really know about it other than the paint might be pealing?

This is a series of activities that can include a tour of the school building from boiler room to kitchen, finding copies of the school blueprints and reading them, scavenger hunt, site/climate analysis, drawing and art installation, observing insect life in the schoolyard, mapping patterns of activity, and building rain gardens.

Your School Yard is a short activity that may part of this larger series or a stand-alone activity. In this outdoor observation exercise students are asked to measure off one square yard in the play area and mark it with chalk or masking tape. The ground material can be anything (grass, dirt, asphalt). Now ask the students to sit quietly and observe everything that happens in their designated area. What do they see, hear, smell? They can draw or note the activities on a sheet of paper.

Please contact us for further description of activities for What holds up the Paint? A Look at your School or any of the other listed activities. We are happy to work with your school to develop activities that fit your particular curriculum.

Related Links

Architectural Education Resource Center (resource sales):
AIA New Hampshire Learning by Design
Architecture in Education (includes lesson plans)
Center for Environmental Education, Antioch New England Graduate School (about place-based education)
CUBE–The Center for Understanding the Built Environment (about Box City, Walk Around the Block, and more. Includes lesson plans)
Design Education
Design Share (about the design of learning environments; has floor plans of schools)
Salvadori Center–Education and the Built Environment (many structures-related projects)
American Architectural Foundation
American Planning Association
Boston Schoolyard Initiative
Chicago Architecture Foundation
Great Buildings