Skip to content

Week 2

Assignments

  1. Design and cut a sticker (or heat transfer) for your classroom/context that reflects your understanding of the maker mindset /maker movement in education.

As a school librarian, I am interested in the overlap between various design process frameworks and corresponding research/inqury process frameworks. I have personally come to believe that in both cases, the ability to iterate is becoming increasingly important. Just as you have to test and revisit a prototype, for example, you also have to iterate a research question or an AI chat prompt. So I think both frameworks present opportunities to teach students how to iterate.

For this assignment, I wanted to combine the design process and the research/inquiry process. I settled on nine steps:

  1. Task Definition (I always make a point to include this, because I often find students take off before understanding what they need to do.)
  2. Explore
  3. Evaluate
  4. Ideate
  5. Create
  6. Test
  7. Iterate
  8. Share
  9. Reflect (Since I work at an IB school and “Reflect” is part of the IB Learner Profile, I wanted to make this its own step.)

Process

  • My first step was to use ChatGPT to create an initial version of the image I wanted. I considered using Canva but it did not have the type of cut-friendly radial infographic that I wanted. ChatGPT seemed to me the most efficient way to express my ideal visually.
  • I went through several iterations with ChatGPT:

Three versions of a radial infographic I made using ChatGPT of the Inquiry/Design Cycle

A picture of Laura while the Silhouette cutter cuts her vinyl sticker.

Reflection

Overall, I gave myself too complicated an image. It was extremely difficult to weed while keeping the letters intact. I realized once I started that the image was not consistent around the radius; a pitfall of using AI to create it. Fortunately I was able to fix it (more or less).

The transfer went extremely well, and though I didn’t affix the transfer tape to my window perfectly, the sticker nonetheless went on smoothly and didn’t require any fixing, except for one letter that ended up a bit crooked.

If I were going to do this again, I would either modify my design idea so that I could use Canva instead of ChatGPT, or I would have iterated my AI design to make it simpler.

Tools

For this project I used my Macbook Air, my Silhouette cutter, the Silhouette software, small scissors, and tweezers. My secret weapon was a library tool called a “book squeegee” that is used to put plastic covers on library books. It worked especially well for affixing the transfer tape both to the sticker and the window.

Here is my finished product.

Laura's finished vinyl sticker.

✏ Edit this page