Play, experiment, explore

From my trade background I was involved in automotive, worked for General Motors for a while in Hamilton, so the materials side of things just come naturally. They kind of give me an interest and quite a good knowledge base about a lot of things that I could bring to teaching. And you know over the years I’ve probably introduced a lot of that stuff and I haven’t been afraid to approach it and have a go at it, and I think that’s really important.

One of the things that our school decided to do many years ago was to introduce technology using as many practical experiences we could for our students. They want to be able to feel things and touch things and play with things. Introducing the knowledge strand or the tech products component has been really good in that respect because there’s so many products and things around that we can look at and we can read and we can make decisions about.

I regularly talk to my boys about wheels because I believe that wheels are such a good product to think about. I bring in things regularly that I see. I bring in articles out of newspapers that I find, I bring in products that I’ll just find and I’ll think “oh that’s different”. Got a good connection with industry in the Waikato and they regularly open their doors to us to have a look and I generally scoop up a lot of stuff when I’m there. Whether it’s, you know, recycled plastic bags, eco-friendly plastic bags, right through to plastic injection moulders – stuff for examples that we use.

I also try and promote the students to bring stuff in as well, so that they can come in and talk about the stuff that they’ve found, and quite often they will say to me “Sir, I couldn’t bring it in but did you see that thing on TV?” or “Did you read that thing in the paper about such and such?”

These are my text books. These are the things that I like to teach my students. Sometimes they are directly related to the project that we’re producing, so it might be something to do with our weather stations and we might be looking at ways of catching the water. But other times it could be something that is not related to our project or the unit of work that we’re doing, it could be just something that I’ve found and that we want to talk about, and that we learn things about.

And they are always available in the workshop for the boys to pick up and play with. And once they’ve been around for a while I always, I generally leave them on the wall in my workshop so that they are still there to generate the thinking that we’re trying to produce in the workshop.

So just to reinforce those things that I’ve talked about, I think it’s really important that we use these existing products as a teaching tool because they are hands on for our boys, they are practical experiences. Whether it’s a bike or a lawnmower or a, just a simple handheld thing, they are really interested in it. They can see it, they can hold it, and it tells them a story and they like that.