The creative toy task offered me an opportunity to enhance and develop my Information and Communication Technology (ICT) skills, achieved by managing and organising this in-depth project. Due to the complexity and detail the task required, we were guided early on to use Cloud-based software to keep our decisions and planning easy to follow and document. The software our group chose was Microsoft Planner as it was simple to use, yet extremely effective.

Together, the usually challenging phase of planning was made much easier as we could assign roles, apply dates, and use the ‘importance’ feature to make sure that we were always on task, keeping to the schedule. In addition, wanting to take advantage of the popularity of mobile devices, we developed QR code system for tracking feedback and pre-orders.

This led to a ‘form’ link which provided us opportunity to recognise trends, organise statistics and read our feedback/orders neatly and it was something we could never lose. Furthermore, we utilised Adobe Creative Cloud Express and Canva in order to market and advertise products. It was almost effortless to create simple marketing campaigns and long in-depth descriptions of our product was made appealing through the use of these software’s. Finally, Adobe Illustrator was employed to create vectors. The difference between this software and the others was that this was a required software in order to create vectors to laser cut our products.

Here is some photos of us exercising our ICT skills:

In addition to ICT skills, the creative toy task allowed us to exercise and enhance our Critical and Creative thinking. Since we were assigned with creating a toy from scratch, it was essential that we had to think creatively. In the beginning, we struggled. Progress was sluggish as we simply couldn’t come up with an idea that we found would be successful. After employing Mr Mayhills’ techniques we slowly started gaining an idea of an ideal product that we would agree on. The most notable techniques being a vision board, something that seems straightforward but truly gave us inspiration for our product. This along with conversations with Mr Scotti(woodwork teacher) and we had a clear idea of what our product was meant to look like. At the closing of this project, it seemed ideas were flowing whenever we had to resolve an issue, definitely the most improved skill in this whole project. One memorable example was the final design of the product and how we needed to accommodate multiple different puzzles into one finished product.

Critical thinking, the more underused skill but one we definitely needed to apply more. At the Wanju market, the climax of this project, we found very little success. Reflecting on the entire project has brought to my attention how little we actually evaluated our product how important that process should have been. Frankly, we needed to ask ourselves more “What would our target audience think about this?”. However I believe we did deserve some credit as our critical thinking skills did improve over the course of this project. One key example was evaluate Pro’s and Con’s of different materials and we had to make an inform decision. There was progress but not enough to become a successful business. Reflecting on our market, we could definitely became way more successful if we refined our Critical thinking.

The final skill that we exercised and developed through the process was numeracy skills. Whilst ‘numbers’ may seem like a broad, elementary skill, it was way to involved in the project to not be discussed. Numeracy was everywhere. Calculating ideal dimensions, financing our product were the 2 largest contributors. Here are some examples. This project entailed $100 per individual. Since our group has 3 people, we were presented with $300 to design and developed suitable products for our market. Dividing the limited money into different categories such as developing a prototype, marketing cost and sellable products is an example of how we used numeracy. Furthermore we had to calculate cost of making a product (achieved by diving the area of 1 product by the acrylic area, then dividing that by the cost of the acrylic) to then make a suitable profit margin (we were recommending cost price + 30%). Definitely one of the more intense use of numeracy. One final example was was solving the issue of choking hazard by comparing it to the recommended size of pieces (3cm^2) to make our product safe whilst using minimal material for a larger profit margin.

Here are some graphs and images of how we displayed numeracy skills.