2. Hits and Misses
• Mrs. Sudha’s 8th grade class studying the effects of
screen and text color on retention of information. The
challenge was worded as “How might we change
text/background color of our class-website to increase
retention of content?”
• After a brainstorming activity to list popular text and
background colors, Mrs. Sudha listed the ideas on a
whiteboard
• The students were instructed to place red-stickers on
color combinations they found favorable for
information retention
• The color combinations with
blue/yellow, blue/green, green/yellow got the most
“Hits” or red-stickers while combinations such as
red/purple, red/green got the least hits.
3. Visual Ranking
• Mr. Chen’s 7th grade students were working on a project to build a
low-cost solar dehydrator
• They used SCAMPER to gather ideas to design the solar dehydrator
• After the SCAMPER activity, a lot of design options were generated
• Mr. Chen created a list of these options using an online visual ranking
tool
•
He then divided the students into groups and let each of these groups
rank these options, based on their cost-effectiveness
•
He selected the top ranks from each group’s list for further
convergence. The top-ranked design ideas included:
• Using two cardboard boxes as dryer and collector
• Using foil car window-shades to create curved solar concentrators
• Using metal baking trays and painting them black
4. Evaluation Matrix
•
B
Mrs. Lacey asked her students to create an
evaluation matrix to evaluate the options.
Criteria for evaluation included: (A)Low
Cost, (B) Easy Implementation, (C) Less Time
Consuming
•
A
•
•
Criteria
Some of the ideas generated by Mrs. Lacey’s
7th grade class to minimize the effects of
pollution by petrol stations were:(a) Re-locate
petrol stations, (b) Establish a 100m belt
around the petrol station, (c) Enclose the petrol
stations within a giant bubble
Using these criteria against options, the
students assigned a rating scale from 1 to 5 .
The higher the rating the better the option
•
Idea (b) “Establish a 100m belt around the
petrol station where no houses, schools etc can
be built” with the highest overall rating was
selected as the best option.
C
Ideas
a
b
c
1
4
2
1
3
3
2
3
3
•
5. Paired Comparison Analysis
•
•
A
B
C
B
C
Mrs. Lacey marks the idea options: (A)
Re-locate petrol stations, (B) Establish
a 100m belt around the petrol station,
(C) Enclose the petrol stations within a
giant bubble as column headings
•
She then marks the same options as
column headings.
•
A
Ms. Lacey’s 7th grade class decided to
use the PCA technique to evaluate
options for their problem on
minimizing effects of pollution by petrol
pumps.
Each item is compared against other,
using a rating scale of (0) “No
Preference (1)”Slightly Prefer”, (2)
“Moderately Prefer” and (3) “Greatly
Prefer”
•
The scores for each option are totaled.
Option B receives a score of 4 and is
declared the best option.
Total
A or B A or C A=3
B2
A3
B or C B = 4
B2
C=0
6. ALoU (Advantages, Limitations and Unique
Features)
•
Mr. Spedding’s students want to further refine their idea to use
curved solar panels for their solar cooker.
• Their challenge is: “How might we find a way to make/buy
properly curved solar panels to improve the design of our solar
cooker?” They used the ALoU technique as follows as follows:
• Advantages
• Curved solar panels concentrate sunlight better
• Limitations
• Difficult to make and expensive to buy
• Overcome it by: Borrow money for initial set-up and sell
popcorn in the school to re-pay the money
• Unique Features
• Curved solar panels work as energy concentrators without the
need for a parabolic system
• Can be used to cook other foods – in addition to pop-corn
