National Invention Education

Professional Development Plan

2017

Goal: To offer new markets a professional development package which includes:

Agenda
Presentation
Complimentary videos
Activities
Inventor stories (for example, Texas assessments using the story of hiccuppops in one of their testproblems)

Professional Development Agenda:

Welcome

Introduction

The team should introduce themselves, and thank donors of the space, and special guests, such as Superintendents.

Thank you for being here

Overview of the day

Preview the agenda with your audience
Although we offer competition at both the state and national level, we are an educational program first.
Our competitions are a celebration of hard work.
The competitions generate excitement to bring backto the schools and helpthe program grow.

Introduction of participants

Ask participants to introduce their district, grade, and what you hope to get out of workshop.

Icebreaker: My unique socks!

Goal: to get the audience engaged and excited about brainstorming. Ask your audience to come up with as many questions as they can to determine what socks you are wearing.
You do not have to wear any socks, just make sure you stand behind a podium, wear pants, or wear boots to cover your feet, and pretend to put some on.
Preface the activity with asking them to get silly.
Encourage teachers that when they do this In their classrooms, they should introduce the rules of brainstorming. Provide teachers with these rules as a resource.
Procedure:
Adjust timing based on notice level and engagement.
You can make this a competitionfor the most amount of questions/the best question.
Round 1
As individuals, have theparticipants write down asmany questions as they can think of to figure out what socks you are wearing – 30 seconds
After 30 seconds, ask participants to count their questions and call out their numbers.
Go around the room to discover whatquestions they came up with.
Celebrate the questions and ask questions back to the audience to elicit more questions.
Use “go more with that” or “what would that tell you”
Round 2
Put participants into groups of 2-3 to think of more questions. Encourage silliness and out of the box thinking - 30 seconds.
At the end of 30 seconds, ask participants to count the questions they came up with from that round and call out their numbers
Point out to your audience the number of questions they were able to come up with when working together verses individually.
Go around the room to discover what questions they came up with.
Celebrate the questions and ask questions back to the audience to elicit more questions.
Round 3
In their groups, come up with more questions. Stress quantity over quality - 45 seconds.
Ask participants to count the questions they came up with from that round and total; call out their numbers
Go around the room to discover what questions they came up with.
End result: you are looking for the room to get louder, people smiling and laughing, leaning in to the conversations, and possibly some new sock innovations.
At the end, use the questions to compose your sock description. You could share that you have on transparent socks, that make you look like you have a pedicure, which smell like lavender, and scuff off dead skin.
Ask audience if they noticed what happened to their bodies as they participated
Looking for answers such as: heart beating faster, leaning in, mind working faster, got better at questioning, laughing, smiling
Ask audience if they noticed what happened to the room: louder due to silliness, more questions, laughing, more energy
Ask audience what skill we were teaching through the activity.
Wrap up:
Make sure your teachers understand how to do this activity in their classrooms.
Brainstorming wild ideas can be difficult with older children (especially at the middle school level, where your students may not want to stand out or be silly).
Teachers must cultivate the environment to encourage their students to be silly during brainstorming. Explain brainstorming rules in September and provide practice.
This story emphasizes the point to teachers:
A California teacher shows a pencil to her students and then says, “what is this”. After many serious suggestions, she suggests getting silly. When a student suggests, “it is a nose-picker”, she celebrates that answer instead of correcting.
Refer to rules of brainstorming and creativeways to teach classroom rules/procedures in their packets.

Creativity

Reference bikers/runners – you can perform these tasks, even though it has been awhile, due to muscle memory.
Ask the audience to raise their hands if they have ridden a bike within the week, within the year, have not ridden a bike in over 10 years.
Similar to creativity – we can rebuild that skill.
Creativity study:
Test results amongst 5 year olds: 98% scored as creative geniuses
Test results amongst 10 year olds: 30% scored as creative geniuses
Test results amongst 15 year olds: 12% scored as creative geniuses
Same test given to 280,000 adults: 2% scored as creative geniuses

We were born to be creative geniuses; we simply need to rebuild that skill again.
The more students can be creative and ask questions, the more engagement, and thus the more fun they have.
Unfortunately, with large class sizes and much information to teach, education does not promote question asking.
Here is the study for your reference:

Who we are as an organization

State introduction and history – how did the program start in the state
Individuals involved in supporting the teachers
Mission of the program
Exclusive avenue to attend NICEE
How the program intends to serve the schools, their teachers, and their children
57% female nationally
Our program is flexible, journals to choose from, different activities to use, and flexible timelines.
We cannot tout ourselves as the experts in creativity and innovation, and provide you with a scripted program.
VIDEO – overview of the program
NICEE video:
Invention Convention Overview Video:
What Teachers have to say about the Invention Convention?

Value of invention education

Pillar slide
There is an absence of invention education, compared to science,engineering, and entrepreneurship.
We need to establish an innovation ecosystem and all of the pillars are a part of this.
Originalthought is missing from science and engineering, that is why we need invention.
Science – facts
Engineering - given the problem
When you try to force a scientist to becomean entrepreneur, you do not get much – scientist only has research, may not be a new idea.
Invention is the bridgebetween science/engineering and entrepreneurship.
How many of you attend your staff meetings where you are brainstorming new initiatives, but never brainstorm the problems? Our students will know how to identify problems and will not have to wait for anyone to tell them the problems.
Entrepreneurship – taking something to market
May not necessarily be a new idea, could open a pizza shop or a bank
We are a creative problem solving program –
We do not tout ourselves as a STEM program,due to the hesitancy of students to participate.
We celebrate students as scientists and engineers after the program, so they are not afraid upfront to participate
We involve so many different subjects in school, some schools even teachour program in their art classes.
There are no degrees in invention/innovation
Our industries are begging for innovators, because innovators come up with original problems to understand, brainstorm solutions, and then engineer solutions.

Invention Process

Explain the steps
Identifying – hardest part to teach, but you want your students asking questions, being curious about people and the problems they encounter.
Understanding – researching the scope of the problem, and what else already exists to solve it.
Ideating – imagining and brainstorming how to make something better.
Designing, Building, Testing – this is where students may fail, and we want them to – teach them that the reward is having to iterate, not the “right” answer.
Communication – involved inevery step, in the form of oral and written communication (in their journals).

Logbooks/Journals

Use at every step
Provide options:
journal – open-ended
workbook - more prescriptive; Invention League Model
show examples
Show student made journals to your audience on a document camera, as you explain the steps in creating this book.
Dateevery page
Using journals shows the students how they preserved over time, which builds confidence

The model of the Professional Development follows the same model of how the curriculum is set up, teach an activity and follow up with a lesson.

SCAMPER Activity

You will need materials and worksheets.
Take your participants through the activity.

Identifying

Important to spend time with your students on this step.
2 weeks, but it does not have to take up a lot of class time every day.
Revisit every class for 5 minutes.
Put everyday objects in the frontofthe class (such as a crayon box, water bottle, paper clip, etc)and have students come up with problems with that object.
Have students ask their parents and others how their day was, how they like their job, what problems did they encounter at work – document in their journal
Have students look at different industries (page 3 in the Student Journal), sometimes children have a great invention, but do not know what industry it can be used in.
Workbook - Page 1 – invention terms to teach
Workbook – page 3 – how to find problem, watchingthe news or have parents tell them appropriate news stories.

Understanding

Inventors can define a problem better when they perform research.
Absence of research truly hurts our inventors, as they will not understand the gravity of their problem, who it affects, what outcomes they are looking for.
2 purposes:
Understand what their problem involves
What already exists to solve their problem
Dominic story – prescription bottle invention
Rachel story - pajamas
Our students have very interesting problems – help them explore these by talking to others, slowing down, using their journal.
The prototype is not always the most important aspect of the invention story; sometimes it is the understanding of the problem and the problem itself.
Sources of research:
USPTO.gov
You will need to help them choose key words to describe their invention.
Google search (although Google is not the source):
Type in the problem they are trying to solve or use key descriptive words.
Subject matter experts
If you are inventing a piece of soccer equipment, visit a sporting goods store.
You can always call people if your students cannot get to anyone
Trade publications

Review

1st step – Identifying – if you need to cut something short, this is not the one.
SCAMPER, socks activity, object in front of the classroom every day.
2nd step – Research – narrow down to top 3 ideas and research what already exists.

Ideating & Designing – go hand-in-hand

Brainstorming solutions
Oftentimes gets shorthanded, because children want to go right into building a prototype. First, they need to think about design and materials.
Children want to design intheir head, but we need them to document everything they are thinking about in termsof design.

Take Apart

You will need materials and worksheets.
Take your participants through the activity.

Review Invention Process

Identifying – finding a problem and identifying an opportunity.
Understanding – researching the problems and solutions that already exist.
Ideating – one of their ideas should stand out.
Design – encourage materials from home.
Students need to think about age-appropriate material.
Students can explain to judges that their prototype would have been made of a different, more expensive material.

Engineering Design Process

There are different options for the frame around this activity:
Nuclearmeltdown
Viral containment
Garbage pick up
Slime pick up
You will need materials and worksheets.
Take your participants through the activity.

Local program logistics

State competition
You choose the inventors who attend
You can host your local invention convention in your classroom, school, or district to select the inventors who advance.
Suggested timeline
1 day per week
2 weeks of identifying the problem
SCAMPER, object everyday
2 weeks of understanding - research
2 weeks ideating and designing – vetting ideas and drawing out potential prototypes
Prototyping – 3 / 4 weeks
Set the expectation that your students will iterate multiple times
Communication – 2 weeks – designing display board, cleaning up journal
September / October – 8 weeks to teach Identifying – first initial prototype
November / December – first iteration of prototype
Over winter break – show people the invention and test
Return from break – finish prototype, work on communication (design display board, finish journal)
Teach it often enough to keep momentum, and long enough to practice and build skills.
Steps of what to do after today
Step 1: Sign up to participate in the program and choose an ambassador for communication purposes.
Step 2: Familiarize yourself with all of the materials in the Dropbox.
Step 3: Define your program
Conservatively for the first year. Once you have inventors, they will want to participate again, so they can help you grow your program.
Think about how many hours per week you have to dedicate to the invention process.
Districts who host the program during school see more reward; more inventors mean more excitement.
Consider inviting the grade above you to join you in planning meetings, as these are the students who will want to participate the next year.
Think about including kindergarten and first grade – this will help build the skills necessary.
Will you allow teams?
Step 4: Roll out the program to your students
Use inventor videos from other invention conventions, from Ellen and Fallon.
Get parents on board to assist.
5th: Plan your local invention convention
Where will your local invention convention be held? What date? (Refer to your State convention date and work backwards.)
Whom will you invite to your convention – Superintendent? Principal? Legislators?
We have resources (including press releases) to help you plan this event – please connect with your program contacts for assistance.

Frequently Asked Questions

What participants need

An Agenda
Presentation printout for note taking
Activities handouts (Scamper, Take Apart)
Materials for activities
See list of resources in your binder.

Timing

This is designed as a 6 hour presentation outline; it could easily be expanded into 7-8 hours allowing for more Q&A for educators; :45 minutes for lunch and slightly more time on activities.
8 hours would allow for more time for reflection and to work out how they will implement this after the presentation.
Consider offering 2 hour workshops as a follow up option
Consider offering Friday afternoon into Saturday morning workshops.

Additional topics

Setting the tone for creative classrooms; see attached.
Interactive journals
Encourage parent involvement in providing feedback to inventors in journals.
National conference
Both attending and hosting
Use teacher funding programs to pay for teachers to attend

Accreditation