Using the E4I resources to help students understand Canadian Medical Innovations

Ms. Jennifer Coon from the Waterloo Catholic District School Board shared her experience with the Education for Innovation grade 1-8 teacher resources. Ms. Coon focused on Ingenious Innovations Module Grade 7. Find out how she adapted the E4I Resources for Medical Innovations here:

Using the E4I resources to help students understand Canadian Medical Innovations.

In grade 7, the focus is on Medical Innovations, therefore, Ms. Coon used the Ingenious Module as a way to help students understand Canadian Medical Innovations. The grade 7 innovators had to make connections to how the innovations made life happier, safer and healthier.

Ms. Coon took the ideas of various lesson plans from the resource and created “My own Minds on/ Activation task” for students to focus on exploring different medical innovations.

“As a class, we defined Innovation so that students could make connections to making something better. “

Students had to ‘Inquire’ a selected medical innovation and the Canadian Innovator. They explored the pros and cons of their selected innovation to discover its impact and how it makes a difference in the world and challenges that the innovation may have. Students were impressed with the number of innovations that came from Canadians and were able to understand the significance of Canadians in the world.

What’s your Innovation Story?

As the focus was on making the world, happier, healthier and safer. Innovators were asked to take an existing object and improve it focusing on these criteria. Afterwards, to make connections to Media Literacy, students were asked to create an infomercial to sell their product to the class. In order to encourage the incubation process students were given a peer assessment to give their fellow innovators ways to improve their innovation one more. 

Here are some examples of how students explained how Ms’ Coon’s class’s innovations made the world happier, safer and healthier;

• A never dulling hockey skate: The skate makes people happier because less time and money is spent getting skates sharpened. It makes people safer because there is no risk of injury from dull skates and, it makes the world safer because less steel would be put into landfills from skates being sharpened all the time.
• A removable pot handle: The pot handle makes people happier because they could multi-task while cooking and the pot handle would indicate when their food was ready. It makes the world safer because no one would get burned by touching a hot pan on the stove and, it makes people healthier because their food would always be prepared properly and you wouldn’t have to worry about e-coli from your meat not being prepared properly.