Hat Storage

Introduction

Gaynor Cotching, Yvonne Skinner, Andrew Crawford, Judy Harrison and June Crawford of Mayfair School, Hastings

Mayfair School has a policy that states that children, in the sun, must wear a school hat during terms 1 and 4 of the school year.

We decided to give the children the chance to work on a problem which affected them personally – sunhat storage. This is a problem throughout the school. As each of the classes stored their hats in a different type of area, we expected them to come up with their own individual solution.

The 'problem' was identified...

All the school hats look exactly the same and although names were printed inside they are very difficult to read. The children were to come up with suggestions as to how to make it easier to identify the hats. The solution had to be cost effective, appropriate for the whole school and either washable or easily removed for cleaning.

Four classes have been involved and each had an engineer to work with throughout the project. At a meeting with the engineers we explained our "problem" and how we wanted to come up with solutions which were manageable by the children and which they had generated themselves. We said that it was important that the children had ownership of the ideas and understood the technological practice.

Background

Mayfair School is a decile 3 school in Hastings, Hawke's Bay. The makeup of our students is 54% Māori, 44% Pakeha, and 2% are of other ethnic groups. The Senior Syndicate (Years 4-6) comprises about 100 students with varying ability in English.

Technology has been incorporated into the planning of all our units since converting an unused classroom to a Technology centre in 1999, with problem-solving and innovation encouraged throughout all subject areas. The school has a goal to be the leading school in technology within the Hawke's Bay.

To find out about Mayfair School visit their website www.mayfair.school.nz

Pre-planning

Context: Sun hat storage                   Year:                   Duration:

Predetermined Learning Outcomes

Students will:

1. Understand the properties of the school hat and the effect this has on the design of a storage system

2. Understand the technological principles of durability, functionality and aesthetics in the context of the development of a hat storage system

3. Be able to develop a brief for a school hat storage system

Assessment Criteria

Assessment Strategies

1. Brief development – Write/illustrate a progress report for your parents/caregivers that explains what we've decided is important in our hat storage system.

Rooms 1 and 3

New Entrants and Junior School

New Entrants to Year 3

The teachers of New Entrants to Year 3 students share the outcomes of their work to make the hats easy to identify.

Solutions

Room 1 New Entrants

As most of these children aren't yet able to read they decided a picture inside the hat would be best. It was covered with clear tape to make it waterproof so that the hat could be washed.

Room 3 New Entrants

We made a quick collage of hats from magazines and we made a list of people who wear hats at work. Before the topic we had a go at making a hat with very little adult help. Discussions brought out some of the problems we would experience later... How to make it fit, which glue to use, how will we identify it as ours, could we have planned (drawn) it first?

We went over the ideas we had for how we could identify our hats then together decided on a set of criteria for identifying out hats. A hat:

• couldn't have words or numbers on it
• had to be unique
• had to be water proof
• had to last a long time (up to year 6)

The children found it very difficult to brainstorm a way to identify the hats until Antonia showed us the butterfly in her hat. We had to relate our solution to the criteria. Many children needed a lot of help. We decided to put a picture inside the hat with sticky plastic. The children then completed a paper hat and drew a picture to go inside it. Many children chose a cat so that reminded us the each idea had to be different. We used the computer to generate a page of pictures and each child chose their own. The children could see if pictures had already been selected as they were all visible on screen. Pictures were printed and stuck inside the blue school hats and the children presented their hats to eachother in small groups. The children discovered that the office lady wouldn't know who each picture belonged to and they considered this to be a problem. But they realised they would know and decided to tell her that all Room 3's hats had a picture in them and she could send them to us. A small group were chosen to present their ideas in assembly.

Junior School – Rooms 4, 5 and 7

Room 4 Year 1

These children came up with the idea of putting initialled beads on the chin strap. When the new sunhats arrived it was discovered that they have two holes on the side and so the solution was modified.

The Senior Syndicate

Room 8

Teacher: Judy Harrison

Room 8 worked with engineer Peter Free from MWH (NZ) Ltd.

Stage 1

The intention of this stage was for the children to define the problem and to begin to understand the technological principles of durability, functionality and aesthetics in the context of the development of the hat storage system.

Before Mr Free's visit we began to write a brief taking into account that:

• we don't want hats to get lost
• we don't want to take the wrong hats
• we want to eliminate the confusion and congestion when trying to get hats from pegs in the corridor

To find out how others stored hats we sent faxes to the local Fire Station, Alexander's Construction Company, Hawke's Bay Network Ltd.

Stage 2

During this stage it was important to develop the children's understanding of the properties of the school hat and the effect this would have on the design of the storage system. We looked at the properties of the hat, measured it and determined if it could be reduced, rolled or flattened.

Stage 3

In stage 3 we further defined our brief by identifying what the storage unit should do. What would a suitable storage unit look like? Should all the hats be together or stored separately? Where should the storage unit be – in the classroom, the cloak bay or somewhere else? Should it be up high or down low?

Stage 4

The children brainstormed some solutions and considered what a storage solution might look like, how it would work, whether it could be made and is it practical. After a review of all of the suggestions the students combined the best ideas together to come up with something that fitted all criteria. They sketched designs and voted on which system would be the best.

Stage 5

This stage involved the students in learning to draw an object and how to do dimensional diagrams. Incorporated was some graphic design and the students went on to draw the detailed design.

Stage 6

The children constructed prototypes and learned about the uses of various materials and types of fastenings. They reflected on their efforts and then considered ways to improve their hat storage system.

Stage 7

The final piece of work was to complete a hat storage system to our design.

Teacher's Comments

As the children are in an environment where they are encouraged and can take risks, this technology programme has been a great success and the children have (through research, discussion and hands on activities) produced a system for storing hats.

After the problem was identified our engineer, Peter Free guided the children through various stages. As the programme progressed it was good to see the co-operation in group work.

Brainstorming at each stage was important and children were keen to revisit previous stages to identify and explain the links between each stage. Initially the children's ideas were a bit far-fetched but when they thought about the practical and physical possibilities they developed skills and knowledge.

Comments from the children

• It has been fun having Mr Free, our Engineer
• Mr Free guided us through the process
• Mr Free helped us plan our ideas
• He provided some of our materials
• We learnt lots
• He made us think. Throughout the unit we had fun.
• All our hard work was paid off because we can use some of our ideas in other units
• He made it exciting
• He made us feel proud of what we could achieve
• We put heaps of thought into what we did
• It was good to see the finished product
• It would be good to do something like this again.

The children and I certainly valued the input from our engineer.

Engineer's Comments

I found the Neighbourhood Engineering process interesting and fun. I found I was able to connect well with the class and I believe they responded well to the structured thinking process that Judy Harrison and I taught to the kids. From a career development point of view I found I was able to extend an engineering/scientific thought process to a simple problem-solving exercise in an area of technology in which I have not studied or worked in before.

The Planning Phase

Diary

Ideas for storage

Poster

Poster

Senior Syndicate – Room 12

Teacher: June Crawford

Room 12 worked with Simon Reveley, a process engineer from Heinz-Wattie. The children enjoyed hearing about some of the problems Simon had to solve at work and how he went about it. He amazed us with all sorts of facts and figures. Each visit and discussion session with Simon was written up on a flip chart, so we could use it for reference during dicussions between his visits.

Our flip charts explain what we did...

Examples of hook labeling

No room in classroom desks

We need to be able to:

• Store our hats without damaging them
• Store our hats while we are working
• Store our hats after school

At the moment they are:

	1	2	3
in desks	?	x	o
on hooks	x	o	o
in bags	x	o	x
on chairs	x	x	x

Solution

We decided, as a class that the solution that best satisfied most of the reasons why our hats were a problem was already available but needed a small improvement.

We already have hooks in the corridor for our bags. If we labelled our hooks clearly we would all be able to find out hats easily and others would be able to put them away if they found them.

Labels for our hooks

We measured the distance between hooks and each group talked about what size would be good for the label. We cut some paper to the sizes suggested and blu-tacked them up by the hooks.

After discussion we decided that an even bigger one would be better and decided 15cm x 6cm would be a good size. We also thought they would look better all the same size.

Teacher's Comments

To have outside expertise in any field can only be of benefit to children and teachers. Simon Reveley's experience and knowledge of technological practice was invaluable. His approach was methodical and easy for the children to follow. Simon shared practical problems he had to solve in his work with the children and they found this motivating.

Engineer's Comments

I spent time telling stories from my work, which interested the children especially when we got them to work out things (like how many minutes at 500cans per minute it takes to make all the baked beans the class eats in a year).

The problem-solving exercise for their hats worked well, with plenty of ideas generated (like a robot that goes around the school collecting hats). I hope that the concepts of design (clear identification of problem, generation of possible solutions and evaluation against criteria) are retained.

I enjoyed the time I spent in Room 12 and I think most of the children did too. They have been exposed to a practical design process and given a vision of what can be achieved on an industrial scale by the same methods used on their problem.

Syndicate – Room 14

Teacher: Yvonne Skinner

Room 14 worked with Peter Volker from Peter Volker Consulting Engineer Ltd.

Diary of a Hat Project

19 May

Mr Volker came and the children explained what the problem was with the hats. These were all listed. The children felt the problems were that hats got:

• Lost

• Fell off the hooks in the cloak bay

• Other children took them when they couldn't find their own

• Took up too much room in a desk

• Came off the backs of the chairs

• Were only worn for two terms

From here Mr Volker helped the children to brainstormed possible solutions. He explained that to come up with a suitable solution an engineer would come up with a design brief. The points they needed to look at were:

• Space

• Access

• Strength

• Easily found

• Hygiene

• Good looking

• Safe

• Cheap

He explained each of the above ideas and why they were important. Each child then had to draw a picture to show their solution to the problem. At this stage there were to be no conclusions.

26 May

Mr Volker also brought in a mock-up of an idea of his own to help motivate the children. He had a model of a wheel, rather like one which is used in raffles where people have a lucky number and the wheel is spun. After talking about his idea and how it fitted the design brief we looked at all the ideas that the children had come up with. They split into groups and rated each one according to the design brief. Realising that things were not going as planned we revisited our brainstorming and refocussed on the general ideas for storage cabinets, hooks etc. We had a look at what was available in the classroom. The children split into groups and had a look at two or three options to see which they preferred. The solutions they came up with were – using the existing newspaper cabinet, Velcro-ing the hats to the wall by the cloak bay with their names facing outwards so that they can be easily recognized and using a pillowcase over the back of a chair.

28 May

I got the children to draw their preferred solutions on full sized paper. They measured the shelf on the cabinet, cut out a newsprint shelf to those measurements and then cut out cardboard circles to the correct diameter of the hat. They drew around these on the paper to see how many hats would fit on the shelf. We went through the same process with the piece of available wall. The third group drew a picture of how their pillow case would look.

4 June

Mr Volker came and looked at their full sized models of shelves etc and then taught the children how to scale these down in size to fit on an A4 piece of paper with some interesting results. The children realised that the hats would not fit so they drew them rolled up and it still didn't work so they all discussed the problem and decided that two of the solutions would not work.

7 June

Mr Volker came and we revisited which ideas would work as the children could see that the shelving and Velcro ideas didn't work. One child was really quite insistent that her idea of the pillow case would work if it was changed more into a bag to go over the back of the chair. Mr Volker also introduced the idea of a hook on the side of the desk but it soon be came apparent to everyone that this idea wouldn't work as a permanent solution as the desks were put in groups and the groups changed from time to time so we decided to go with the chair bag idea. From there we needed to find a bag that would fit all the different types of chairs in the room and possibly in the whole senior area. We drew diagrams of chairs and took the appropriate measurements.

14 June

Mrs Murdoch, Emily's Mum, came to school and worked with a group of children while I worked with the rest and we took the measurements of the biggest chair and decided that with the use of elastic we could make a bag which would fit all the types of chairs. We drew out our own patterns on newsprint. Mrs Murdoch took her pattern home and made a chair bag which Emily brought back to school.

18 June

Groups of children worked together making mock-up chairbags out of the materials available in the room. We made some bags out of several thicknesses of newspaper and some from plastic and masking tape.

21 June

Mr Volker came back and saw our products. He related everything back to the original design brief and checked that it met each criteria. He showed the children how to go about the last part of the project which was looking at costs. He went through the process on the board explaining how you needed to work out how much material would be needed for each chair, the amount of thread and elastic that would be needed. He also explained how you would need to multiply these costs by the number of bags needed. We decided that some children would write to material shops to ask about suitable types of material and related costs.

One group was going to write to a child's father to see if he could find out who supplied the mesh for onion bags as Mr Volker felt that a mesh material would be good as it would let the hats breathe and also dry if they were wet. He explained how this idea fitted with the original brief. Later, during that week the children wrote to a Mum who worked at Spotlight, the Dad who was in charge of an onion packing business and to 128, a local dressmaking shop.

11 August

After the holidays Mr Volker came back to class and took a small group of children aside and worked out the cost of producing 30 chair bags using the onion bag sample that had been sent to the class from the Auckland company. The remainder of the class group worked with me to cost the production of a material bag.

There was no comparison in the costs:

• If made professionally the material chair bags for a class of 30 would be about $1000
• The onion bags for a class of 30 would be $20 per class plus a small cost to sew them. The cost per bag was calculated at 35 cents plus GST.

The children decided that the onion bag was the better option of the two as it fitted all the criteria and was much cheaper to produce. Even school wide the cost would be reasonable.

11 September

Two girls, Anna and Emma, presented the above findings in a power point presentation to the Home and School Committee members. They will be making a decision soon as to whether to go ahead with the project.

15 September

The four engineers who have been involved in the project came to a special morning tea and were presented with certificates and a petrol voucher.

Teachers Comments

I found it really interesting working with Peter as I learned more about technological processes. The children learned the importance of revisiting ideas and working to a design brief. They could see that their solutions had to be practical and workable. They learned to look at existing systems to see if they could be modified and when they couldn't, to look for new solutions. The children and I had the opportunity to work with someone who had more expertise and also a fresh approach and a different way of looking at the problem.

Engineer's Comments

An opportunity for me to get in close contact with today's primary school environment, and to make an effort and contribution to bridging the widening gaps that are developing between various categories of people as a result of specialisation and different backgrounds.

Evaluation

Overall we found that the children were more enthusiastic about technology for this unit. The brainstorming process was very important. It was often repeated throughout the unit as each new problem came up. The initial brainstorming ideas were quite practical and were not that original, but after some discussion about other possibilities their ideas became more fanciful, for instance, robots, thief detectors etc. With further guidance the children had to work out what was physically possible and practical and within their capabilities of making. Each time we brainstormed it was related back to the original brief.

Budget was also an important factor – here the engineers' experiences were invaluable because of their professional knowledge of costing, equipment etc. We found that children were more willing to revisit ideas and we feel that this is because it was a "hands on" project and there was to be a product at the end.

The majority of children have learned that when you design something there needs to be a "brief" and that this is referred back to throughout the whole process from start to finish. The relating of an engineer's experiences with a "problem" reinforced the importance of the process. This understanding should help with the next unit of technology that we do as we can refer the children back to the processes that we have gone through with our engineers during the hat unit.