Making a Soda Recipe- Teaching 7 year olds the Design Process

What could be more fun than designing your own flavor of soda?  Following on the lessons in Designing Mixtures in which children read about the scientists that design the flavors of jellybeans they have a chance to design their own flavors of soda.   This is a great example of a set of lessons for 7 year old children that teach the design process in addition to the core science concepts.   (Can you tell that I am still focused on teaching the design process ?)

Here are some of the key questions that I have for science lessons:
   Is it engaging to students? 
Anyone who has worked with children knows that design challenges for kids should be fun.... and over the years I have seen a number of fun design challenges:

• design a circuit that will light up three light bulbs at once

• design a container that will protect an egg from being dropped off the roof

• design a tower built of newspaper that will support a weight 

• design a bridge that is built from cardboard that will support toy cars as they cross a distance.

 Is it authentic to science and engineering practices?

While many of these lesson are lots of fun and very engaging-  most of these challenges are one time events.  While it may keep everyone busy for days before hand at some point there will be great show of demonstrating the results - dropping egg containers off the roof - driving toy cars across the paper bridges and so forth. 

 During this process most kids are totally engaged.  They have a great time and have a chance to try out some new ideas.  But there are usually some children that are just totally lost through out whole unit.  They just don't  understand the challenge and have no idea how to be successful at accomplishing the task.  Sometimes they end up being the creative, decorative member of their team - using colored lights, or creating cool designs for the outside of the container or the tower.    But, somehow they miss the central point and never have a chance to work through the cycle of generating ideas, testing them out and then trying other alternatives.  

And even the children that  are very successful - those ones that do understand what they are tasked with accomplishing - these children are often the first ones engaged in creating a solution.  They often  jump at the first idea that strikes them and then proceed to spend the available time just trying to get it to work.

But, the actual design process in science or engineering doesn't work that way.  It is a systematic process.  

So what does an authentic design process look like for a seven year old child?

In the Designing Mixtures unit the Grade 2 students are given fun challenges but they are guided through the design process so that they have the opportunities to work through their investigations and creations in a systematic way. There are two main design challenges during the unit, one is to design a good glue and the other is to design a new flavor of soda. In both challenges they have opportunities to develop a foundational knowledge about the properties of the materials that they might be working with and to go through more than one cycle of creating a mixture and testing it to see if it fits with the key properties that are needed.

 "Because students are engaging in the challenge of designing specific mixtures (as distinct from designing a care, a computer, or some other technological product that one builds) their design work naturally always involves mixing ingredients together.   Common steps in this design process that will emerge are identifying the desired properties, testing ingredients, mixing them together, testing the mixture, possibly revising, and communicating results.

Important Steps in designing mixtures include:
1. Decide on the properties you want your new mixture to have.
2. Think of possible ingredients to make the mixture.
3. Test the possible ingredients to find out their properties.
4. Mix ingredients together to make a mixture with more than one property.
5. Compare the result to the list of properties to see if you mixture meets your goals.
6. Try again if the properties are not close enough.
7. Record a recipe that describes how to make the mixture."
From Teacher's Guide for Designing Mixtures 

3. Is there a clear conceptual progression inherent in the practices and the sequence of the lessons in the unit?

Here is an example of the conceptual progression for the Designing Mixtures unit.   This is the conceptual progression for the Design Process.

In the video below I have added another lesson from the Designing Mixtures unit.   (Note :please forgive the jumpy video shots - these are were recorded on the fly when there was a quick opportunity to get some footage.)

In this lesson the students have already tested their substances and evaluated them for taste and have designed their own soda recipe.   In this lesson they are going to be making the recipe created by their partner and their partner will be making their soda recipe.