Recreational Activities

High Flyers

Your child will participate in an activity where they build their very own wooden planes. Through this exercise, they will learn about design thinking, problem solving, and the importance of communication.

Central to building each unit is the engineering design cycle: ask, imagine, plan, create, improve. The cycle helps to foster curiosity and creativity, and allows students to develop their problem-solving skills such as: testing alternative options, interpreting results, and evaluating their solutions.

Tasks and challenges have been designed to be as open-ended as possible, to avoid only one ‘right answer’; in particular, the unit developers have aimed to avoid competition which may alienate some pupils, while retaining the motivation of problem solving. An important goal of all of the units is to maximise opportunities for group work and to support students in learning to work together to communicate their ideas effectively.

Students need to discuss their ideas as they explore a new problem, work out what they need to know and share their findings, design solutions, and then improvements.