October 25, 2010

By: Franc L. from Philadelphia, PA
Comments: 11

Posted By: Franc Leo
On: 6/2/2007 12:39:01 PM

Hello to all ! I have been out of the conversations page for a while, but for those that follow my sporadic posts on my blog (https://francleodesign.blogspot.com/ remember?), you'll see that I'm still in the game. This time I would like to tell you of my student/teacher experience at CHAD with hands-on Design with a building material called K'nex. I know that many (if not all) know about this "toy". I have been working with it for the last year and find it fascinating! My students were not very enthusiastic about it at the beginning, but when they learned the basics, there was no stopping them from dreaming and designing bigger and bigger stuctures and eventually building them. Bottom line, I lost half of the working area in my classroom, as you will soon see in my photos, and these spectacular structures were part of the (second) First Friday exhibit at CHAD. I had a slide show that was showing photos of the whole K'nex project process of the students, I added some eclectic musical mix, and arranged the class as a Design-and-Build tour to be shown by the students. Oh, about losing all this space? The students were just fine with it. instead of feeling the pressure from the lack of space, they welcomed the change, and enjoyed modifying the structures to fit thier needs to work in class.

Posted By: sudha singh
On: 6/13/2007 10:46:22 PM

Franco, I would love to see the pictures and implement it in some of my classes.I will visit your page too to read more about what you have been doing.