This week is visual arts in education week. The visual arts are so much more than what you see.

Did you know?

• Most children and youth spend 10 hours per day in front of screens composed of pictures and words.
• 1.25 million Americans currently work in the visual arts. Jobs for artists and designers are predicted to increase by 43% by 2016.

10 lessons the arts teach:

• The arts teach children to make good judgements about qualitative relationships. Unlike much of the curriculum in which correct answers and rules prevail, in the arts, it is judgement rather than rules that prevail.
• The arts teach children that problems can have more than one solution and that questions can have more than one answer.
• The arts celebrate multiple perspectives. One of their large lessons is that there are many ways to see and interpret the world.
• The arts teach children that in complex forms of problem solving purposes are seldom fixed, but change with circumstance and opportunity. Learning in the arts requires the ability and a willingness to surrender to the unanticipated possibilities of the work as it unfolds.
• The arts make vivid the fact that neither words in their literal form nor numbers exhaust what we can know. The limits of our language do not define the limits of our cognition.
• The arts teach students that small differences can have large effects. The arts traffic in subtleties.
• The arts teach students to think through and within a material. All art forms employ some means through which images become real.
• The arts help children learn to say what cannot be said. When children are invited to disclose what a work of art helps them feel, they must reach into their poetic capacities to find the words that will do the job.
• The arts enable us to have experience we can have from no other source and through such experience discover the range and variety of what we are capable of feeling.
• The arts’ inclusion in the school curriculum symbolizes to the young what adults believe is important.

Students in ITE 7 were given specific criteria and constraints for designing and constructing their own 3-D room in a scale model. Practical problem solving comes into play through the use of available space, material, expense and some construction code enforcement.

Student’s creative juices flowed as they were given the chance to build their virtual room. Accessories were the highlight, as they designed furniture from available materials and brought detail and personal touches that ranged from tiny clothes on hangers to huge flat screen TV’s displaying their favorite shows.

Critical thinking is the glue between abstract learning and practical life. Give your kids a problem and a plan and they might surprise you with the solution of what they are capable of doing when they apply themselves.

Purpose of the assigment:

To study and apply the engineering design process.

•  Define the problem
• Gather information
• Develop a solution
• Model the solution
• Test and evaluate the solution
• Refine the solution
• Communicate your ideas