Innovation is doing new things...
The Challenge
“Gravity is a habit that is hard to shake off," says Terry Pratchett in his book, Small Gods, and this is reflected in man's attitude to gravity, space, flight and freedom. While Newton first formulated the laws of gravity in 1687 in his discourse, Principia Mathematica, the concept of gravity had been addressed, tinkered with and experimented on by thinkers as far back as Aristotle. Newton understood gravity by an apple dropping; you will address gravity through the medium of a dropped pen, falling from a 1st floor balcony to the floor.
You and your team of three will attempt to defy gravity. The challenge is to use your choice of a range of materials to design and create an apparatus that will slow the descent of a pen dropped from a 1st floor balcony. The team whose pen takes the longest time to fall, from release to hitting the floor, wins.
Skills Takeaway
This Innovation Challenge is all about creativity and innovation. The basic premise of some kind of parachute/glider contraption to arrest the descent of a pen to the floor is straightforward, but the number of different approaches generated by the material variety, by time constraints, and by the skill-sets of your team members, for example, means that the design created will be inherently innovative - new, original, leaning on models from your own experience but stamped with your own group's mark.
Further skills applicable to wider-world working are:
1. Positive teamworking: this might look like sharing solutions to trouble-shooting, working together effectively towards a defined goal, or a greater understanding and negotiation of task allocations depending on communication with each other, for example.
2. Effective planning and prototyping, which will lead to a more efficient and purposeful test period
3. Experimentation, testing, refining, retesting - you will need to reflect positively from failure in order to make thoughtful, proactive alterations to the existing design for improved performance
As always, after each challenge, students are invited to submit a reflection on their method and procedures relating to the challenge and their learning outcomes. One of two do, regularly, which is great: but really, this is far too few. One wonders whether the relatively high attendance compared to the low numbers of reflection entries alludes to our society's misapprehension of what matters. Hemingway said, "It is good to have an end to journey toward; but it is the journey that matters, in the end.” This reflection opportunity allows you to focus on what matters - the journey; the process. We won't design makeshift parachutes to stop pens falling quickly for the rest of our lives: however, the skills we might learn might just be the skills we need when faced with a different type of task. Who knows when the skills of negotiation, of leadership, of resilience, of thoughtfulness, or risk assessment, of practical design, of careful planning might come in use? For your next essay? For a task on work experience? For when you are faced with a family disagreement? Perhaps none of these; perhaps all. This is the point: understanding the skills we learn from all these situations, regardless of success and failure, allows to be prepared for the next opportunity. This reflection is your chance to do just that. As ever, there is a prize for the best reflection, which will be posted beneath each challenge.
Hello to all the mates from the Fothergill Society,
The Innovation Challenge on Tuesday left a deep impression on me so that I decided to actually reflect on it and tell you about my thoughts and enrichments I took out of the history room which turned into a right fabric with assiduously working Innovators.
As soon as we got the task, my gorgeous group of Hackwell Junior and Georgia the ukulele queen gather together, ready to win the challenge and to defeat Sowter the Giant. We sat down, the blank paper in front of us, and everybody put down the first idea that came through each of our minds. Luckily, we all had a similar idea, it all felt like we’re one big brain discovering an idea that could change the world, well that’s what we thought. We glued and stuck together, with the finished innovation in our heads, as fast and good as we could. I have to admit that this was followed by several tantrums because the amazing “UHU” glue wasn’t that amazing as it sticks everything together (hands, table-hand, hands-wood, etc.) but just not the stuff we wanted. Finally, even Mr. Plant’s history book found a useful purpose and with a combination of history and another tantrum the wood stuck together. Another thing I discovered was my passion towards the drilling machine. It’s unbelievable how much joy this machine can bring to me. After quick safety instructions which were pretty much “Don’t make a hole in the table, Miss Collingwood will kill us” (Obviously, screwing a whole in myself wasn’t seen as such a problem) I screwed and I can say I wasn’t too bad so the DT after school club got paid off.
*ARB COMMENT: Health and safety protocol was followed a great deal more rigorously than is indicated in this representation. *
Only 5 minutes left. I think that’s when we all realized that this Innovation is going to fail. We had the separate pieces but nothing worked together. At that point I think I had like a little mental confusion, let’s call it that. I started saying Russian (which is not my mother language) “Dawai dawai” which means “faster faster” I guess and even the drilling machine couldn’t cheer me up anymore. So we ran out of time and ended up with a pile of rubbish. Well at least it was still in our heads and I was genuinely impressed what the other groups presented which was completely different to what we were going to do.
At the end of the day I was overly happy though. I mean, I learned more out of that failure than I could ever get out of winning this challenge and as a little extra I became professional in screwing and gluing. For example, keeping it simple is something I totally overlooked. We didn’t even have one hour so how on earth did I thought we could build a whole building even though my screwing skills were outstanding. Viewing things from a realistic way is necessary in every life situation as well as having a backup plan. It maybe was a bit naïve to just think of one idea but at that point it seemed so great that we didn’t even think there could be any better way. But we went for the risk and I don’t regret that because I believe in all or nothing. Furthermore, I also learned that it is important to look around you, what the others are doing, how they proceed. By that I don’t mean copying. Just getting some inspiration and maybe clues how to improve. And I think if we watched the other we would realize that we’re on a wrong track or that we possibly should reconsider our idea. But we were in a zone and with the drilling machine I could feel the power in my hand. Overall, I was impressed how well our group worked together, even though I have never worked with either Henry or Georgia. I just realized that good teamwork is not about working with people who you like so that you don’t get into a conflict. It’s more about agreement, people moving in the same direction, focusing on the same thing and working for the same aim. Probably I took much more out of this challenge which is not as obvious as the things I stated above. However, the skills I gained last Tuesday stretched my mind a little bit more again and I can’t wait to use them in the next innovation challenge and even tomorrow in my daily routine.