Finding Silver Linings!
The Covid-19 pandemic crisis has put a spotlight on the well-being of all. With the confinement and social distancing rules, it has never been so hard for us to tackle anxiety (van der Velden et al., 2020) and other mental health issues.
Have you had some moments that you don’t feel like yourself?
During those moments, have you tried to do something to feel better?
This MakerEd project invites you to work either individually or together on a toy/gadget solution for your targeted age and culture group to improve their well-being. It could be for someone like you, a teenager in the U.S high school, or a secondary student in South Africa.
The learning object (LO):
It is based on the sustainable development goals (SDGs) of the United Nations, 3- Good health and well-being and 4- Quality education.
From a teacher’s perspective, this project helps to teach students to make connections across disciplines in order to raise the quality of instruction for all students and empower them to see the complexity of our society and where they fit in.
As a student, you will learn how to design a project, apply content knowledge from different disciplines, and practice skills to make connections, communicate, strategize, calculate, and produce, in collaboration with others.
For the collaboration tool, you can choose one of the followings:
For the 3D design platform, we recommend using the following:
Below you can find step-by-step lesson plans, learning resources, videos, articles and toolkits to carry out this project. Enjoy! 😊
Step 1, let’s get familiar with the definition of well-being and explore well-being in the SDG and mental health in the context of school education. While you interact collaboratively or individually with visual content, try to develop some essential questions. In this project, you are going to explore the five senses: What will you do to take care of your well-being?
Describe how you take care of well-being in five senses.
SDG 3 Good Health and Well-being — Why it matters
Youtube: Good Health and Well-Being Goals
Youtube: We all have mental health
Here’s a list of the additional resources for you to grasp the contents:
Index: Mental health in children and young people
Blog post: Objects to Help Relieve Anxiety
News: Can Fidget Toys Help Your Child’s Ability To Focus?
News: Why can’t kids get enough of squishies and fidget spinners?
Step 2, find out what you need to relate to your focused sense(s) with ample resources and inspiration. Through the exploration, you will plan and start to build your interdisciplinary project.
We suggest you create 2D design blueprints with the concrete physical object to better form up your ideas. It will also help you to present it to your mentor and obtain feedback from them and other subject matter experts to improve your design.
Develop your 3D prototypes.
When you are ready, use any of the suggested platforms to develop your 3D digital and physical prototypes, it’s gonna be fun!
Step 3, prepare your poster to present the project and share your awesome ideas!
Be creative, you can make the poster with markers and pen or digital resources such as PowerPoint, Canva, or even an explanation video directly from YouTube, Instagram, TikTok.
You should also reach out to an external audience besides presenting the project to the schoolmates. Ideally, the external audience is your targeted culture and age group. In this way, you will get direct feedback from your targeted users to improve and modify the outcome for your final project.
Let’s read the flow chart to review again all steps.
Well done! It’s amazing how you’ve come so far and achieved all the steps. Through this learning journey, you carried out an interdisciplinary project, with a topic to tackle down real-world challenges. We’re proud of you!
Evaluate your performance with the rubrics below:
Reference:
van der Velden, P. G., Contino, C., Das, M., van Loon, P., & Bosmans, M. W. G. (2020). Anxiety and depression symptoms, and lack of emotional support among the general population before and during the COVID-19 pandemic. A prospective national study on prevalence and risk factors. Journal of Affective Disorders, 277, 540–548. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jad.2020.08.026
Wahyuni, A. S., Siahaan, F. B., Arfa, M., Alona, I., & Nerdy, N. (2019). The Relationship between the Duration of Playing Gadget and Mental Emotional State of Elementary School Students. Open access Macedonian journal of medical sciences, 7(1), 148–151. https://doi.org/10.3889/oamjms.2019.037
