Think Like an Engineer- "How to Generate 20% Time Ideas"

Last night I was listing the steps on creating ideas that +Kevin Brookhouser detailed in his book and then I thought to myself why not generate ideas the way an engineer would.  Since I am on my school district's NGSS implementation team, I have become well versed with the Science and Engineering Practices in the NGSS.  So I decided to create a different way to generate student ideas based on the first engineering practice of "Identifying a problem or human need."

(I have included in this post the Google Presentation that I used today with all of the steps that I will be describing.)

To have students identify a problem or human need I had them answer the following questions on a white board.

  What problems exist...

  on campus?
  in the community?
  in the state?
  in the country?
  for teens?
  for veterans?
  for the elderly?
  for kids?
  for you?

Next, I had students do a gallery walk around the classroom looking at the problems other groups of students came up with and I had them add these new problems to their own list.

Once every group had a large list of problems, I had them create prompts, such as "I would like to raise awareness about..."

Finally, I had students create ideas by combining the prompts and ideas that they came up with.  There ideas needed to address a specific problem, who there audience was, and how they were planning on implementing their idea.

This worked out well considering I thought about it and created the steps in one night.  Today, was a good day!!