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Hat Storage

Introduction

Gaynor Cotching, Yvonne Skinner, Andrew Crawford, Judy Harrison and June Crawford of Mayfair School, Hastings

Mayfair School has a policy that states that children, in the sun, must wear a school hat during terms 1 and 4 of the school year.

We decided to give the children the chance to work on a problem which affected them personally – sunhat storage. This is a problem throughout the school. As each of the classes stored their hats in a different type of area, we expected them to come up with their own individual solution.

The 'problem' was identified...

All the school hats look exactly the same and although names were printed inside they are very difficult to read. The children were to come up with suggestions as to how to make it easier to identify the hats. The solution had to be cost effective, appropriate for the whole school and either washable or easily removed for cleaning.

Four classes have been involved and each had an engineer to work with throughout the project. At a meeting with the engineers we explained our "problem" and how we wanted to come up with solutions which were manageable by the children and which they had generated themselves. We said that it was important that the children had ownership of the ideas and understood the technological practice.