1-6 Generate Project Ideas

Your team's project challenge is to design and build a smart device that could improve or benefit your school. Your goal is to create a useful and innovative solution that solves a problem, fulfills a need, or improves an existing situation in the school community or school environment.

YOUR TASK

Each team member should generate his or her own set of possible ideas for what problem your project might solve. Later on, your team will share and discuss their ideas, in order to evaluate and refine them to select the problem to tackle for your project. (After that, your team will go through another process to generate, evaluate, and refine ideas for the solution to your selected problem.)

Over the next couple of weeks outside of class (while your team is building a smart thermostat during class), you should "look and listen" by observing problems or issues around school and talking with stakeholders affected by these issues.

Stakeholders from the school community might include students, teachers, administrators, staff, parents, etc. Depending on the problem, the stakeholders might belong to specific subgroups such as: student athletes, students involved in extra-curricular activities, maintenance staff, cafeteria staff, etc.

Each team member should generate and record at least 5 possible ideas for problems to solve using this template.

Here are a few tips:

1. Don't worry about knowing all the details yet about the problems. Record enough information to be able to explain the ideas to your team. If needed, your team can gather more information later if an idea seems worth pursuing.

2. Don't worry about how "good" each idea is. Your team will discuss and evaluate the ideas later. Sometimes an idea that doesn't seem promising at first turns out to be a great idea.

3. Don't worry yet about trying to come up with solutions to the problems. Your team will focus on figuring out possible solutions later.