№ 005 · Creative thinking · Generate, evaluate and improve ideas
Rethinking the school yard
Students suggest different ideas for using the school yard for learning, pick one and improve it under real constraints.
Material for students
The school yard stands empty
The school has a 30 × 40 metre yard. Right now there is only a football pitch and a few benches. The principal has asked students for ideas on how to use the yard for lessons.
Constraints: a small budget; winter frosts reach −30 °C; the football pitch must stay.
Questions
Teacher's guide
Skill: the three facets of creative thinking in the PISA 2022 framework: generating diverse ideas, generating original ideas, and evaluating and improving ideas.
Good answer: the ideas are genuinely different (for example a sundial for geography, an observation plot for biology, a measuring area for mathematics), not a list of similar variants. The improvement deals with the constraint concretely: snow sculptures in winter, an indoor version in severe frost.
On assessment: there is no single right answer. Discuss the variety of ideas and the quality of the improvement; do not grade.
Typical mistake: giving three versions of one idea (three different sports pitches) or ignoring the constraint.
In your subject
Literature
Suggest alternative endings to a story in different genres.
Design & technology
Think of several ways to improve an everyday object and develop one.
Physics
Suggest different experiments that show the same phenomenon.
I used this task
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