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Apollo 13 - Learning Science in the Context of Design

The unit continues with activities that focus on comparing and contrasting different designs ideas, choosing which ideas best address a challenge, using real-world cases to help understand a design challenge better, developing rules of thumb based on analysis, and carefully gathering data and keeping good records to facilitate justification of design changes. Each activity incorporates a subset of LBD's rituals and builds on the lessons learned from earlier activities.

They finish the unit with a more complex design activity that requires substantial planning, that brings together all of the skills and rituals they've been learning over the previous weeks, and that begins to give them the opportunity to learn science in the context of design. The final activity in Apollo 13 lasts seven days. The final challenge for those students engaging in physical science is to design the slowest-falling parachute they can out of coffee filters and string. The parachute should hold two or three nickel-sized washers. The class begins by messing about with materials, taping filters together in different configurations to see how that effects the rate of fall. They continue by engaging in whiteboarding - identifying what they've noticed, ideas they have, and what they need to learn more about. Much of what they need to learn more about is how different properties of their parachutes will contribute to parachute performance. They pull these out as variables, and each group in the class chooses a different variable to test, holding the others constant. They report their results to the class, generating Parachute Rules of Thumb along the way. If other students don't believe the results of a group, they are encouraged to suggest ways of redesigning or running the experiment so that results will be more believable, and they send that group back for further investigations. Any groups that have generated believable results (not many the first time through) choose a different variable and investigate its effects on rate of fall. This is the first time they are generating rules of thumb that have specific science content - about air resistance, gravity, and their interactions, effects of mass, weight, and so on. We ask teachers to spend some time on these concepts so that students will recognize that they are learning science through design activities. However, we ask them to save longer discussion on these issues for a later unit on Newton's Laws (Kolodner et al, 1998).

After a believable set of rules of thumb has been created, each group designs its best. They share their ideas in a pin-up session. Every design decision must be justified based on the rules of thumb that have been generated through experimentation. When a group misunderstands a rule of thumb derived by another group, there is opportunity for discussion and further explanation and suggestions. Sometimes a group will ignore a rule of thumb, and others in the class point that out and make suggestions. After the pin-up session, each group revises its design ideas based on class discussion and moves on to construct their best parachute. A series of gallery walks are held as groups iterate toward their best designs. With each gallery walk, students have a chance to explain why some design decision they made wasn't a good one and why they changed it, and new rules of thumb might emerge. Once all groups are on their way to constructing successful parachutes, the students move towards a more competitive stance, iteratively moving toward their best without additional gallery walks. A contest is held at the end followed by comparison and discussion.

By the end of this activity, students have had significant experience designing experiments that test one variable at a time, controlling variables, testing a variable at several different levels, incorporating the results of several simple experiments into a design plan, and justifying design decisions based on many data sources. Throughout, doing is interspersed with reflection on the activities and what can be learned from them. Students have the opportunity to begin to learn skills in one challenge and then to apply them again in another challenge, and also discuss how their classroom activities, and the challenges they face, are similar to the experiences they've seen depicted in the film presentations and examples about real scientists and designers in their workbooks. Following the unit's activities, the class members summarize what they've experienced and learned, and anticipate when it might be useful.

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Learning by Design™ • Georgia Institute of Technology • 801 Atlantic • Atlanta, GA 30332-0280 • lbd@cc.gatech.edu