Creating Characters and Inventor Goggles

The session began with us talking a little bit about ourselves and what inventing is all about. We decided the best way to get the children even more excited about Inventing was to create some Inventor Goggles to wear whilst Inventing. They had a the choice of three templates and endless amount of colour, freedom and creativity!

Once our goggles were made we thought of our characters. We decided to let the children create anything they liked as long as they had fun! Some of the characters we had were linked to pets or had several arms and legs. With their characters now created we started to have a discussion about what types of problems there characters would face and how we could invent something to help ease this issue for them.

Thinking...

By sticking to the class topic of 'Our City' we started of session 2 with a mind map discussion about Edinburgh and Scotland. We received great ideas from all the children from tartan and the flag to famous Scottish inventors such as John Logie Baird. After our initial thinking we started Inventing! This was what the children had been excited for. Not so long after the children had pages full of ideas to help solve their characters problems. We asked the kids to talk to us about their ideas before we started to develop them. We encouraged them to think outside the box and use lots of colours to help them express their ideas.

Finalising Ideas...

Once the ideas were down we had a class discussion about some of the ideas the children had come up with and how we could remember to incorporate some of our class topic 'Our City' into our inventions. As a team us Little Inventors decided to create our very own invention to show the children how a drawing can go from paper to 3D. They really loved seeing our idea and we finished this task with a wee video showing us making the invention.

The next task the children took part in was more of an active one. To test whether the children had been paying close enough attention during our session we decided to end the day with a quiz! Working in their tables the kids answered 6 questions multiple choice. Once everyone was finished we asked them to stand up and move to the side of the room they thought the answer was.

Final Ideas/Prototyping

Once our final ideas were thought of the last task was to make them nice, neat and professional! We encouraged the children to take their time with their drawings as this was the pieces of paper the First year design students would be using to make some of their inventions come to life!

The next task for the children was to craft their inventions. They were very excited to do some crafting after spending many hours drawing their ideas down on paper. This way they felt they were able to express their ideas in a different format. The kids really enjoyed this process and were more involved in delivering their models productively. The models they make will be used in the exhibition and for the first year design students to use as a guidance to their interpretations.