Design Cycle

I missed yesterday because I was working at the ISAC football tournament, and so today was my first day in Mr. Jones' class. We were asked to look over the design cycle, something that Mr. LeSurf had pounded into our heads is something I'm sure most of us know inside out.

The design checklist is up on Mr. Jones' wikispace, which is very useful for us because it would be easy to look through whenever we may need it anywhere at all, rather than e-mailing and sending and going through all of the effort.

Anyway, there is nothing new here, we've looked over the design cycle many, many times and we have learnt about how we have to investigate, evaluate, create, plan, and design.

Investigation - The student is asked to investigate and do a bit of research and type up a few pages on what you are going to do, and explain how you plan to do it, and some additional information on your project so that it's there for the teacher's reference whenever he's looking through your project just to make sure that you're sticking to what you planned and you're not improvising.

Plan - Self explanatory, plan what you're going to do, how you're going to do it and when you're going to do it. A plan can usually just be made into a sort of schedule, marking certain classes for certain tasks and it can help you stay organized throughout the project.

Design - Again, self explanatory. You think up three designs, explain all three of them and finally choose one of the three to actually create. Also, at the end you have to type a paragraph on which you picked, why you picked it and also add any additional information.

Create - This can also be called the process journal. This is where I make often journal entries and I talk about what I did in class and how I did it, etc.

Evaluation - This is where I reflect on what I did, how I did it, frustrations, problems, etc.