We are always looking for ways to make Makers Empire more useful for teachers and more engaging for students. While students are busy creating new designs and honing their 3D modelling skills, we want teachers to feel confident that their students are also achieving learning outcomes relevant to the Design and Technologies or Engineering Design curriculum they are teaching. Â
Makers Empire teachers never cease to impress us with their innovative and creative ideas for using Makers Empire to help their students achieve curriculum learning outcomes. However, we also know how busy teachers are and how difficult it can be to find time to sit down and plan engaging, curriculum-aligned units of work. So we’ve taken a bit of the workload from our busy teachers by providing ready-made courses for students to work through.Â
Introducing New Challenge Courses
Each course contains four different activities:
- Videos: we introduce information and ideas.
- Quizzes: students test their knowledge and understanding in a Game Show style multiple-choice quiz.
- Pro-training tutorials: students are led step-by-step to design cool things and learn new skills.
- Design challenges: students are given an open-ended design challenge or problem to solve.
Each course provides a complete design program for students. Challenge courses are carefully aligned with international curriculum outcomes, centred around a theme and are designed to take 4-10 weeks to complete. Teachers, for example, might plan to have their students work through a Challenge Course for one lesson per week over a term. Over that term, students will be addressing all aspects of the Design and Technologies curriculum without teachers needing to do any extra planning.
Current Challenge Courses
Challenge Courses are accessed by students via Challenge Central in the Makers Empire app. Our Challenge Courses are based on relevant and current themes that have age-appropriate appeal.Â
Assessing Challenge Courses
You can assign challenge courses to students via the Teacher Dashboard in seconds. You can also see at a glance where your whole class is up to in the Challenge Course with our new challenge reports. Here you can monitor students’ progress, view designs, assess student work and provide feedback on individual designs. Students will then be able to read your feedback in the app on their own devices.
“I love being able to see (students’) progress which helps me with writing reports later this term and of course being able to help the kids having problems, which you can’t always see in a class of 26 in a 50 minute lesson. The kids are absolutely loving it and learning a lot through these Challenges.”
Johanna, Teacher
5 tips for teachers using Challenge Courses
- Plan: When you are planning your Design and Technology lessons for the term, why not consider using one of our Challenge Courses as the starting point or centrepiece of a term long focus?
- Integrate: There’s more to our Challenge Courses than Design and Technology. Each course draws from other curriculum areas and is presented as an integrated unit of work. For example: students develop their design processes and skills while learning about animal adaptations, which is a focus in most science curricula for Year 4 or 5 students around the world.
- Curriculum: All Challenge Courses are aligned to the Makers Empire Design and Technology Curriculum that helps teachers address Australian Curriculum, Next Generation Science Standards (US), the UK National Curriculum, and other curricula from around the world.Â
- Report: Our new challenge reports provide a snapshot of the activities students have completed in a Challenge Course. Teachers can assess individual tasks, or the Challenge Course as a whole. The new report is presented as a useful snapshot of class progress. Reports can also be generated for individual students, making it easy to share student learning with parents, school leaders, and the students themselves.
- Differentiate:Â Teachers can easily assign Challenge Courses to their students using the Teacher Dashboard. With one simple action from the teacher, students will be able to access the entire Challenge Course when they enter the Challenge Central section of the Makers Empire app. To make it easier for teachers to differentiate their instruction, it is also easy to assign different Challenge Courses to individual students.
New Challenge Courses
We are planning to add to our Challenge Courses over the coming months. So browse the full list of current Challenge Courses. If you have any great ideas for Challenge Courses, we would love to hear from you. We want to make these courses as useful as possible for teachers so your ideas are important to us.
Mandi Dimitriadis
Mandi Dimitriadis, DipT. is the award-winning, highly regarded and passionate Director of Learning at Makers Empire. She is an experienced classroom teacher who recognises the power of technology to enhance teaching and improve educational outcomes. Mandi has extensive experience with curriculum development and learning, having previously developed programs for the Australian Government’s Department of Education, and having created custom curriculum for Makers Empire schools in the USA, China and the UAE. She is passionate about Design Thinking and how best to prepare today’s students for the future.
