Designing the Exterior of a Home
                                                                        By:  Matt Stout

Project at a Glance :

Students will be designing the exterior of a house via the game of Life.  Students will spin a spinner to determining their “professions” and the professions will determine how much money students have to spend on their home.  Students will then then research various styles of homes, while determining where in the world they want to build their house of choice. They will then create the exterior of their style home while calculating the surface area and total cost. Students will conclude by presenting their house to the class (why they choose what they did) and end with a dot voting for the most creative house.
       
 
Driving Question:

How can we design a potential home exterior while meeting a budget?             

Standards:

• Design and build the exterior of a house while calculating surface area and building cost.​

Team / Culture Building:

• Creative Sequence Assessment to build a balanced group of students for their project. 
• Hopes, Fears, Norms
• Virtual tour of various houses throughout time. ​

Stakeholders:

• Students
• Construction workers
• Architects 
• Home owners

​Empathy Building:

• Empathy Map for stakeholders and homeowners​.​

Inquiry / Need to Knows:

• ​The topic proceeding the project will all be about surface area.  Students will also need to know how to find the total cost of their project (material * unit cost). ​

Incubation:

• Use the Poker Chip strategy to get kids to all have a voice in the say on their groups house.  Each kid gets 2 chips and every chip has to be a different idea for solving the driving question.
• YES, AND CAN IT? 
• RIP SLAP AND PASS protocol 
• SCAMPER ​​

Checking in:

• There will be a daily check in.  Students will have milestones they should be at by the start/end of each class. ​

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Solution Building:

• Students will draw a picture of their solution idea, followed by a Gallery Walk when students give feedback in the  I like, I wish, What if? format. 
• Use Dot voting to sift through the best solution ideas.
• Once the group has it narrowed down to 2-3 ideas, students will use the Filtering and Objective protocol to identify the last things that they would have on their house. 

Critique and Revision: 

• Groups will pair up and do the CHARRETTE protocol.  This will let groups present their project so far to another group and explain why they chose what they did.  In return, they can get constructive feedback about their project before they will be presenting to the class. ​​

Authentic Audience:

• Construction workers
• Architects 
• Home owners​

Final Presentation:

• Each group will give a one minute elevator speech describing the shape/s of their house and why they chose to build their house the way that they did.
• Students can create prototypes of  their house out of Legos, draw their house on poster board, create their house on Minecraft or other resources excluding a computer aided program. 
• Rubric will consist of a daily point total. It will also consist of a personal report where group members  rate each other throughout the project. 

Click here for teacher's full plan.

​Reflection and Feedback:

• Students will use sticky notes (anonymous) to write what they liked about the other groups project and what they wonder about the groups project. 
• Students will be able to use the sticky notes and reflect upon the advice given from their peers and address it in their individual summary/team grade.​

Meet the Educator:

​Matt Stout currently teaches Geometry and Honors Geometry at Holland High School.

     “I love taking skills from the classroom and using them in application to the real world.  PBL helps to make this happen!”