PBL, Maker Ed & The Supply Chain

Incorporating Aspects of the Supply Chain Into a Project Based Learning Lesson

Students will be tasked with designing, prototyping, and presenting a toy to a live “trade show” to describe and demonstrate their “product.”

Since MIT’s Seymour Papert transformed Piaget’s Constructivism into Constructionism, educational researchers have known that significant student agency resulting in a tangible artifact is both more effective and more durable than traditional education techniques. Students in Papert’s lab who were briefly introduced to an early command-line computer graphics program, taught themselves to code simply by playing.

The modern pedagogical expression of Papert’s Constructionism is called Maker Ed, or maker education. This educational philosophy is the center of today’s school-based makerspaces.

Students will use the Design Cycle to build a product using a limited budget which they will then present in a simulated trade show. During the build phase of the lesson, the teacher will simulate supply chain challenges and evaluate them partly on how effectively they can adapt .