In the first semester of year 10, we began a creative toy task, requiring us to create a unique toy for 5-6 year olds. After presenting the toy prototype at the Wanju Market, we were asked to reflect on the possible skills and capabilities we had developed over the course of this project.
The aim of this task was to create and sell a well-thought-out product and sell it to possible customers at the Market. As a part of this, it required us to learn the skills necessary to gain the audience’s attention, and engage them in the project. We needed to learn the right way to advertise and promote our product in order to get the most sales possible, in the process, developing my literacy skills. We were also given the opportunity to gain a little experience and become more comfortable with the process by presenting our toy to the Global Goals class with the aim of gaining feedback. This really helped me to understand ways of interacting with the customers and informing them about the various features.
The Creative Toy Task also provided a chance for us to develop personal and social capability by learning how to work well as a team and cater to everybody’s strengths. In teams, you will always find there are a variety of different people, for example, the leaders, followers, listeners, opportunists, and marketers. Each person has there own strengths and are as equally important to the design and marketing process. We learnt how to use our strengths to our advantage, and making group decisions. As part of the experience, we were required to manage the group with minimal outside help, things such as cost and materials, group tasks and individual tasks were in our hands. Even with all this responsibility, we were extremely organised and divided up each duty, burden and detail fairly evenly between members, keeping our strengths in mind when assigning these tasks, resulting in a more efficient team. For example, Sam was to do the vectors and putting our designs onto the computer, while jack was allocated everything to do with price and material orders and I was responsible for marketing/ advertising.
Lastly, this project allowed us to develop and improve numeracy through the creation of our product. “Numeracy encompasses the knowledge, skills, behaviours and dispositions that students need to use mathematics in a wide range of situations. It involves students recognising and understanding the role of mathematics in the world and having the dispositions and capacities to use mathematical knowledge and skills purposefully.” This quote from https://www.australiancurriculum.edu.au/f-10-curriculum/general-capabilities/numeracy/, explains exactly what we have learnt about numeracy over the course of our project. We were required to create, at the least, a prototype in the workshop. In order to do this, we needed to produce a replica of what we wanted in adobe illustrator and enlarge it to our preferred size, needing at least a basic knowledge of vectors and measurements to transfer for the purpose of this task. For the production of our toy, it would be essential for us to figure out the right scale set on the laser cutting machine and know the measurements of both the base board and individual puzzle boards.
