20% Time in Ms. Quinn's Room

20% Time, also known as Genius Hour, comes from Google, where employees use 20% of their work week to devote to projects that they self-instigate. Many of Google's most important innovations have come from 20% Time, like Gmail.

So awhile ago, Daniel Pink wrote a piece about how more businesses should use the 20% time to encourage innovation and creativity. And education people sat up and took notice.

Good teachers know that when you get kids to find their passions and sparks and learn about them, the potential of the learning is incredible. So 20% Time works like this:

If students learn about something they want to learn about and if teachers provide scaffolding of skills needed for students to be self-directed, then students will create something they are proud of that shows significant growth in learning.

A student teaches herself to play piano, using Internet tutorials and the Garage Band app on an iPad.

My school board is piloting a new middle school curriculum called Career and Technology Foundations, which will become a provincial curriculum in 2014. CTF gives students exposure to different strands that make up the Career and Technology Studies courses in high school, allowing them to make good choices about what they might want to take in high school and beyond. More than this, though, CTF lets students personalize their learning to suit them. It focuses on four skills: design, create, appraise, and articulate.

I saw this as a perfect fit for 20% Time. Students need to use all these skills in 20% time. They need to decide on a topic, figure out how to learn about it, and take it through experimenting and prototyping to find out if it works, refine and adjust, and then produce a piece of work.

There will definitely be a series of posts focusing on what 20% Time looks like in my classroom. Next up? Idea-generation: how to help students figure out what they want to learn.

The Marshmallow Challenge: A lesson in innovation, creativity, and collaboration

I teach an option class called Innovation & Technology. In this class, my students design games using Scratch, a visual-based programming tool.

The new term just started last week, and I wanted to begin with some fun, engaging activities that would help students define what makes a good game, and what it means to be innovative and creative.

We started with The Marshmallow Challenge. Participants of the Marshmallow Challenge have eighteen minutes to design and build the tallest structure they can. They have twenty spaghetti noodles, one yard of masking tape, and one yard of string to build the tallest freestanding structure they can. And then, they have one marshmallow that MUST be placed at the top of the structure.

The lessons of this simple activity are actually very complex. Teams have to collaborate very quickly. The more the participants prototype and design ahead of time, the more successful they will be. And if teams take the weight of the marshmallow into account as they are building their structure, rather than placing it on top at the end and watching their structure collapse under the weight, they will also be much more successful. Successful teams use the constraints and parameters to their advantage. Tom Wujec explains:

Here's a photo of my students building a structure.

The tallest structure in my class was 26 inches. The shortest one was a marshmallow with one-inch legs.