It is insane how much students in my class like designing and creating. They have this gift of dreaming something up in their head and making it real. There is just something about kids and how they create and design differently than adults do.
We have been learning about materials and structures in my class. They have been learning about what makes a strong structure, which shapes are the strongest, which materials can endure the most, and why beams are so important when building structures. One day, I brought in a variety of materials and each group was given $200.00 to buy materials to build a structure. We used money because we talked about how engineers often only have so much money to spend when building a project. We also agreed on a time limit to build our bridge structure because sometimes engineers have time limits. They decided on 20 minutes. We also thought that engineers probably have sidekicks and they would need to work with a partner. They also thought that the structure should be able to hold something up so we decided on a plastic jar filled with bingo chips. Okay, so we had our criteria for the project: $200.00 to spend on materials, 20 minutes to build it, would be able to hold a jar, and working together to decide how the money would be spent….LOVE IT!
The store was open for business, students were learning how to spend their money wisely and purchased their materials during the 20 minute time span. Well, all of the sudden, the timer beeped and we did a gallery walk around the room. One student replied, “I didn’t even get to finish my bridge, its falling apart!” One thing that shocked me more was that one student started to cry because he felt like he had failed at the task. I stopped and said, “Do you think engineers fail at their jobs sometimes and don’t finish?” It got really quiet…. One Grade 3 student yelled out, “Yeah, like the Bomber Stadium…it has taken them a whole extra year to build that thing!” I then asked, “So what happened? Did they just stop building or did they get a second chance?” The students looked at me puzzled. I told them that I was glad that they failed the first try at building their structure because then they knew what they needed to do in order to fix and finish their structure. Before I could even say go, one student had ran up to the timer to set another 12 minutes! They all ran to their structures and kept working at them. The structures got better the second time. One students said, “Look what we got done in only 12 minutes.” As we walked around and conducted our tests on the structures, the students were smiling, laughing, and crossing their fingers with excitement during the tests hoping theirs would hold up the jar. The structures weren’t perfect…we all found out that none of the structures could hold the jar up. One students said, “Failing was kind of fun, can we do it again?” I said, “Ya, I wonder what your structure would be like after the third chance?”
It hit me. This lesson covered so much more than curriculum objectives. Students learned that failing was essential to getting better at something. They weren’t failing at all, they were learning.