Attitude:
An open mind is playful and willing to be silly because the best ideas are often hidden within our minds away from our watchful judgmental selves.  The free flow of conflicting ideas is essential for creative thinking.

Look for changes in the story where the character is put into a different position, something changes or a statement is made that you can see opportunities to develop a product or provide a solution.

Starting with questions

If the design challenges don’t jump out to you or your class, a good way to start is by using the 5 W’s (Who, When, Where, What, Why) plus How in question format to begin. As an example you can ask yourself the following questions:

• Based on your listening to the characters, what product could they use to make them better?, wiser? …

Students need questions to turn on their intellectual engines and they need to generate questions from our questions to get their thinking to go somewhere. Thinking is of no use unless it goes somewhere, and again, the questions we ask determine where our thinking goes.  

Remember: We are looking for many design challenges in a story and then we can pick the one that best suits our requirements!

What makes a good design challenge?

Fun,
Solves a real problem
Tied to science and math
Can be done with paper or using simple materials
Can create many extensions from it
Can add your requirements to change the location or theme to suit your learning needs