Lesson Name or Number: ​8: Water Challenge - Ideate

Name: _______________________ Subject: ​Science ​ Grade: ​10 ​ Date:

Rationale:
● Students will need to communicate constructively to come up with creative solutions to
their defined problems.

Prescribed Learning Outcome(s):

● Core Competencies - Communication:
○ Connect and engage with others.
○ Collaborate to plan, carry out, and review constructions and activities.
● Creative Thinking:
○ Generating ideas.

Instructional Objective(s):
● Students will be able to apply previous knowledge and different perspectives to
collaboratively generate novel ideas.

Preparation:
Teacher Students

● Teacher introduces several ● In their teams, students meet and begin

strategies for generating ideas and to employ techniques designed to
can set up time-frames for each facilitate idea generation.
exercise.

Lesson Activities:

● Ideation strategies: ● Students explore different brainstorming

○ Braindump:​ The
participants individually
write down their ideas on
post-it notes and share their
ideas later with the group.
and ideation strategies.
● After generating ideas, teams select 3
ideas that are candidates for prototyping.
● Each team comes up with 3 voting
criteria. An example could be:
 ○ Brainwrite:​ Participants ○ “the most likely to delight,” “the
write down their ideas on rational choice,” “the most
paper, after a few minutes, unexpected.”
they pass on their paper to ● The 2-3 ideas that receive the most votes
another participant who move on to the prototyping stage.
builds on the first person’s
ideas. A few minutes later,
the individual participants
will again pass their papers
on to someone else and the
process continues. After
about 15 minutes, you will
collect the papers and post
them for instant discussion.
○ Worst Possible Idea​:
Instead of going for good
ideas and putting the
pressure on, call for the
worst possible ideas your
team can come up with.
Doing this relieves anxiety
and self-confidence issues
and allows people to be
more playful and
adventurous.

Assessment and Evaluation:

● Students reflect on the ideation stage on their blogs. They should include a brief
summary of the process and highlight which brainstorming strategies they found most
effective. Students may want to discuss how communication within the group impacted
the creative process. Students should include 2-3 “I can statements” from the Core
Competency list.

Materials and Resources:​ (including organizational and/or behavioural management

strategies).
● Whiteboards, dry-erase markers, paper (poster size), etc.

Extensions:
● Teams can begin prototyping if they have completed their blog post.

Adaptations:
● Students can be given prompts and time to generate some ideas ahead of time.
Reflections ​(if necessary, continue on separate sheet):
● On their blog, students reflect on the process of generating ideas. Was there a particular
brainstorming strategy they preferred? What was the “Worst possible idea?” Students
select 1-2 of the “I can” statements from the Core Competency list that aligns with their
experience.