Mathematical Mindset during Design Thinking

 This week, I continue working on improving my STEM/STEAM facilitation skills through the MMSA ACRES program.  Our current assignment asks us to reflect on how to add more opportunities for students to develop a mathematical mindset using purposeful questions.  I chose to review some photos and video clips from a maker experience I lead last year with a small team of students where we used Design Thinking to design wind tunnels. 

The design thinking framework from the Stanford d.school is the problem solving process I most frequently use in maker activities that I plan and lead.  When using design thinking students spend quite a bit of time thinking about WHO they are designing for and DEFINING the problem specifically to meet the needs of WHO they are designing for.  After some wild brainstorming during the IDEATE phase, they build a PROTOTYPE to communicate one of their ideas and TEST it. 

During today's reflection I spent quite a bit of time digging deeper into my understanding of the Common Core mathematical practices 

I proceeded to take a close look at the photos and videos I had collected during our design thinking maker experience and consider which purposeful questions would have created more opportunity for these students to develop a mathematical mindset. 

Here's a 9 minute video demonstrating how mathematical practices could be strengthened  during this design thinking maker event using more purposeful questions. 

You can find more information on the original maker session where a team of student leaders designed and built their wind tunnel prototypes using design thinking here.