Invention Lesson: Designing for Our Community

Suggestions

• This lesson is designed to be flexible and exploratory. Teachers are encouraged to adapt pacing, depth, and products based on student needs. The goal is to build systems thinking, empathy, and problem-solving related to their local community.

• Students can use any of these six soil profile cards if local issues are too complex or if time is limited.

• Spark!Lab Smithsonian Invention Process aligns closely with Invention Convention Worldwide’s 7-step framework and can be used together without confusion. Spark!Lab’s six steps map directly onto ICW’s first six steps using different language to describe the same process. ICW’s seventh step, Communicating, is explicitly built into Lesson 6's Design & Prototype Showcase, where students present their process and share their solution with an audience.

• The Investigate and Inspire sections are designed to be completed on separate days or class periods. Additionally, each section can be extended to give students more time to engage in the “Think It” and “Research It" steps of the invention process.

• To help students develop questions, teachers can use the Question Formulation Technique.

• To help students brainstorm local challenges, teachers can prepare and show photos from around the community related to soil, water harvesting, or agriculture. Students can make observations from what they see in the photos. Alternatively, students can take a photo of a local challenge as homework prior to this lesson.

• When forming groups, consider asking students to identify a personal strength related to the invention process (e.g., researching, designing, organizing, building, presenting). Use their responses to create heterogeneous groups with a range of strengths represented.

• Teachers can invite local experts, designers, or engineers in the field of agriculture or sustainability to share about their invention process.

• If time or context is limited, or depending on classroom needs, teachers can focus on one shared problem, such as schoolyard flooding or dry planters.

• Students can watch these short videos focused on design and climate change for inspiration or as examples:

  • How can design make climate-resilient buildings? (3:51)

  • Fighting Fire with Fire: Traditional Ecological Knowledge and Climate Change (11:00)

• The Lemelson Foundation and SubjectToClimate would love to celebrate student learning by sharing reflections or final presentations on our websites. Teachers can submit photos or examples of student work through this form. All submissions should follow school or district media-sharing policies and exclude student-identifying information unless appropriate permissions are in place.

Prerequisites

• This is lesson 4 of 6 in our 6th-8th grade Science Unit: Soil Solutions in Invention & Design. It is designed to follow lessons 1, 2 & 3 sequentially.

• This lesson and full unit intentionally integrate NGSS Crosscutting Concepts, with students applying these concepts as thinking tools throughout the design process.

• Teachers can create an anchor chart of the seven steps from the Investigate video Spark! Lab Smithsonian presents the Invention Process (8:55)

• Teachers should preview all videos for a clear understanding of the Invention Process, specifically this example from Project Invent: Middle School Changemakers that demonstrates how a class of middle school students engaged in a yearlong design thinking process. 

• Teachers should have a list of reliable resources for students to conduct research into understanding their problem

• Teachers should be prepared to help students develop general questions into specific questions. For example, instead of asking, “How can I stop erosion?” teachers can guide students to ask, “What native plants in our region help stop or slow down erosion?”

• Teachers should prepare additional scaffolding based on student needs and observations from previous lessons in this unit. Additionally, teachers may want to assign student groups or give specific parameters for the formation of small groups.

• Teachers should decide the size of small student groups, ideally between 2 and 5.

Differentiation

• For students needing more support, small groups can use their ideas for water management from Lesson 3 and build on them in this invention process.

• To scale down, teachers can choose one school-based problem and work through the steps as a whole class. Teachers can also identify a set number of local problems from the class brainstorm for students to choose from.

• Students can watch this PBS version of the Engineering Design Process: A Taco Party.

• As an extension activity, students can map cause and effect chains for their problem statement and identify the root cause.

• Students can think through different stakeholder perspectives by discussing how different people in the community would interpret their problem statement. Stakeholders can include a farmer, business owner, homeowner, city planner, the elderly, people without cars, people with health issues, etc.

• For a deeper social studies connection, students can explore and research local land-use history, understanding how different neighborhoods access resources like water and soil to grow food.

• Students can explore the Lo-TEK movement (8:31), a design movement and framework using Indigenous and ancestral knowledge to address modern challenges.