Showcasing 4th Grade Innovation Projects (Innovation series part 2)

In my last post I wrote about how I used Kickstarter's format and several of their videos as exemplars to teach the question, "What triggers innovation?"

Here is why that didn't work:
1) One of the categories I was most excited about "Performance Art". And the angle I went for was Performance Art that improves the world. Performance Art isn't a Kickstarter category. And when I introduced this category I used selected videos from Improv Everywhere. The selected videos focused on how performance art can improve the world by making it a little happier one innovation at a time. It worked with at least one student. From the inspiration of the example videos, he decided he wanted to see what would happen if he put up a sign in hall that said "Dance" and some music. He set this up as his classmates were coming into school one morning. We placed hidden cameras in the hall, he put together a playlist and a sign that said, "Dance In The Hall" and watched what happened. Then he put this video together for his project:

2) The only category I didn't have a video exemplar for was food. Instead we discussed possibilities as a class. From that short discussion born two great ideas. One of my students decided he wanted to invent a new flavor of chocolate. What he ended up with was hot pepper chocolate.
Another student decided she wanted to create her own breakfast cereal. She experimented with combinations of ground oats, brown sugar, ground walnuts, ground cinnamon, honey, vanilla, and other ingredients.







Originally she wanted each piece of cereal to have a smiley face. She didn't have time to perfect the design, but the taste was perfect.



Here is why the whole Kickstarter angle might have worked:

Several projects were created using the Kickstarter exemplars and categories. Here are some examples:

After watching the happy cane video in the fashion category, one boy decided to create flower hair:

Several students decided to make their own board games:

One student decided to make his own table-top RPG game out of Legos:

There were several innovative comics. One student decided to write two comics. Both used the same story, but from two different perspectives: The perspective of the protagonist and the perspective of the antagonist.

The Antagonist Story

The Protagonist Story

A couple of students had some great ideas using augmented reality.

The first featured project extended his comic using Aurasma and Scratch. When the reader pointed their smart device with the loaded Aurasma channel at the dragon in the comic (see below), the following video played:

What the reader would see in Aurasma:

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Another student decided to use Augmented reality for an instruction manual. When the reader pointed their Smart device with the loaded Aurasma channel on a photo, a demonstration of the description would pop up:

What the reader would see in Aurasma:

What I really liked about this unit is that it emphasised real ideas, and my class was able to build upon and mix ideas that already existed to come up with something new. So what triggered their innovations? An individual desire to build something new in an area that interested them. All they needed was conversations, categories, and examples to get them going.