5 Ways To Engage Students in Real-World Problem Solving Across the Curriculum with Makers Empire’s Advanced Module

Students can design in 3D in Makers Empire using one of three design editors: Shaper, Blocker and Advanced. Advanced is designed for students up to grade 10 and significantly extends the learning possible with Makers Empire. So here are five design challenges and project ideas that you could do with your older students using Advanced or another Makers Empire module.

1. Maths-Arts Community Festival

Bring the Arts and the Mathematics faculty together to co-design a Community Art Festival with and for students. Students can develop individual or collaborative art works that reflect historical, cultural and emerging ideas and viewpoints. They can draw on their spatial reasoning skills in 3D design such as moving, rotating, scaling, cutting and extruding shapes as they transform their artworks from 2D to 3D. Hold a community festival, giving students the opportunity to authentically share their learning from both an Arts and Mathematics perspective.

2. School Productions

Mesh learning in the disciplines of the Arts, Design and Technologies and Mathematics by engaging students in a project to design and build sets and props for their next school production. Advanced will provide students with the tools to create accurate prototypes to test out and improve their creative designs.

3. Design Solutions for Sustainability

Research a local community initiative around reducing, reusing and recycling resources. Students identify school/community needs around sustainability and use Advanced to design a sustainable solution to their challenge. Students promote their innovations through school communication channels including assemblies and school websites. This project can draw on their learning across a range of subject areas including HASS, Environmental Science, English and Mathematics. Version 9 of the Australian Curriculum includes the additional organising idea of ‘Design’ as a critical key component of the cross-curriculum priority of sustainability. It highlights the role of innovation and creativity in designing sustainable solutions that reduce impact and restore health and diversity.

4. Community Construction Projects

Students become genuine partners in a school or community-based construction project. Their proposed designs for a new STEM building, classroom furniture, garden structure, or community structure can be accurately designed in Advanced and pitched to school and /or community stakeholders. This project provides opportunity for teachers across the subject areas of STEM, Design and Technology and English to collaborate on a joint project with meaningful learning outcomes for students that develop a range of learning content, capabilities and dispositions.

5. School Events

Involve students in co-designing an upcoming school event such as markets, fairs assemblies or graduation ceremonies. Using Makers Empire across several disciplines such as Mathematics, Design and Technology, STEM, English and the Arts, students can design in the Shaper editor and use AR to test out their ideas in 3D for displays, designs and layout and pitch their ideas to relevant stakeholders.

Students Teacher Students Via Help Videos

Do you teach students in years 7-10 who love to design in 3D? We have a new Advanced Module designed just for your students and we’d love them to create Help videos for our new design editor. For inspiration, invite your students to watch our Help video on how to design a guitar. This video guides the viewer through many of the new tools in 2D sketch mode and then jumps to 3D mode, transforming the guitar into 3D.

Send completed student videos to the team at Makers Empire, who will select videos to be uploaded to the Makers Empire website. For more information contact us at info@makersempire.com