Lego Castaway – An island of creative problem solving [A-126] Home : ALT Annual Conference 2019

Public Group active 1 year ago

Wed, Sep 4 2019, 3:30pm – 4:30pm

Authors: Laura Blundell, and Rachelle O’Brien

Room: Room M2

Theme: Creativity across the curriculum

Type: Workshop, panels or demo (60mins)

Description

Session Description

Imagine this: The sea lapping against the shore, golden sand beneath your toes, the warmth of the sun on your skin, the sound of birds flying overhead. But wait, where is everybody?

You have been shipwrecked on a desert island. You are stranded and alone. Can you survive? Or will you thrive?

Lego Castaway is a workshop designed to nurture curiosity, grow open-mindedness and cultivate problem-solving skills. Using only the powers of your imagination (and some Lego), this workshop will test even the most creative thinkers, to survive dangerous and daring situations.

You will experience the island in one of two ways. As a member of Team Floaty Coconuts, you will find survival tips scattered across the sand. However, if you find yourself on Team-A-Float, your imagination is your biggest ally. There will be twists and turns in both teams so you’ll need to think creatively in order to survive.

Adventurers will be challenged to consider how digital learning and teaching across the curriculum can allow us to frame student activity in a way that results in developing and nurturing creative problem-solving skills. Adventurers will gain hands-on experience of structured and fluid approaches that can be applied in both the classroom and online environments, and how collaboration with others impacts this.

The session will look at a very structured approach to problem-solving versus a more open platform that is designed to allow for further creativity. The uniqueness of this workshop is that the two defined groups do not always produce the expected outcomes, which highlights the challenges of fostering an engaging learning environment. Careful facilitation adds to this experience, as we throw adventurers in at the deep end and let them sink or swim. The session will close by the two teams coming together to explore how their experiences have differed by the way in which each group was facilitated.

This workshop is designed to expose adventurers to applied educational theory in practice. Through this experience adventurers will gain new ideas and experience creative solutions for applying curriculum design principles such as; enquiry-based learning, active learning and scaffolding. You will experience real-world problem-solving in a playful way and explore ideas that you may like to implement in your own practice. By the end of this workshop, adventurers will have a deeper and more practical understanding of the explored educational theories and why such theories are necessary to consider in curriculum development.

So, the question is. Can you thrive on Lego Castaway Island?

This staff development workshop is used in the University of Liverpool as a way to give staff a hands on introduction to enquiry-based learning and encourage them to consider the support mechanisms needed to make delivering education in this way a success. It is hoped that this will go on to impact on their curriculum design. This different way of delivering staff development is favoured for the way in which it tackles complex theory by making it practical, relevant and playful.

Session content

60 minute activity where there will be 2 main groups (can be split into smaller groups if required). Each group will have an island (in Lego form) and a collection of Lego bricks in which to build items to solve challenges. The first part of the workshop participants will work alone to build something useful to aid their survival on the first night stranded on the desert island. The second part of the workshop involves the groups coming together as a camp and working together. Different scenarios will be put to participants to see how they can creatively problem solve and how the structured and fluid approaches impact this. Groups will feedback at the end.