Science Fiction, ELA, and #MakerEd #NCTEVilliage

I'm super excited about the next project in my Design class. I will always be an ELA teacher at heart and really wanted to find a way to incorporate reading fiction into my class. I believe that all teachers are teachers of reading and writing, so I wanted to make sure I have reading and writing elements in my new class. I think I found an awesome project to accomplish this task.

Students will be reading the short story "There Will Come Soft Rains" by Ray Bradbury. After a close reading as a class, we will discuss the different futuristic items written about by Bradbury and students will be challenged to create a prototype of one of the items from the story. Students will be following an Engineering Design Model. I created my own template in Adobe Illustrator for students to follow based on the one found on Link Engineering.

Students will spend the next few weeks researching, designing, and building their prototype. They will need to use the text as a guide to their build and focus on what is described in the text and infer what other parts are needed for their design based on the context surrounding the description. Once students create their prototypes, they will need to write a paragraph explaining what they based their build on in the story. 

I chose "There Will Come Soft Rains" because it is a favorite of mine that has lots of great examples to pull from, but I look forward to exploring and finding more diverse texts that can be used to accomplish the same task. Eventually, I hope to get comfortable with the process to allow students to choose their texts for the project. 

I'd love to hear any suggestions on how you might approach the project. Feel free to leave a message in the comments or send me a message. Until then, here is Leonard Nimoy reading "There Will Come Soft Rains".