Important Problems: Adversity, Inventions, and Authentic Texts
Still, I thought that brainstorming problems they could personally relate to would inspire and motivate the young inventors in my class to come up with something, you know, useful.
Little did I know that current events across the Caribbean would prove more inspiring.
First World Problems
Now I usually use Nearpod or Seesaw (rest in peace, InfuseLearning) to collect doodles that turn into a vocabulary bank: I ask a question they can understand but can’t quite answer in Spanish yet so I can figure out what words they will need to express themselves in the upcoming unit. Being pajama-bound for the day, however, I collected Google Drawings where they simply inserted pictures representing their own day-to-day problems. There was still a definite lack of Gleaming, but I was able to pick out some common themes (aside from homework and time) and turn those into some problem categories we could address.
Here’s what I came up with:
We added these to their notes and matched them up with some of the photos they had inserted in the Google Drawings. When 80% of both Spanish I classes picked the same problem to focus on (tecnología, of course), I knew we had to keep looking to find our inspiration.
Real World Problems
- Un invento obtiene agua potable del aire
- Un adolescente inventa una máquina para potabilizar agua salada de forma barata
- Esta sorprendente botella convierte la humedad del aire en agua potable
Real World Solutions
Where the action really happened was on Seesaw. After reading about trapping water from the air, their pumps were primed. We returned to the Classroom Question and I modeled replying to the problems they had described with possible solutions off the top of my head (third period it was flexible electric grids; fourth it was a water purifying vaso).
So I gave them a drawing template on Seesaw to copy and edit with 3 sentence starters on a label:
- Mi invento puede
- Tiene
- Necesita