What Worked / What Changed
Plenty did not work the first time. These are the course corrections that mattered — kept here because the next round goes better when the friction is written down.
Students could name a topic but not write a line of inquiry that led anywhere. Sentence frames and a few worked examples fixed it. Most groups rewrote their lines at least once before they were any use on the wall.
Some pasted prompts and answers from MagicSchool into their notes without reading them. The notes looked full and meant nothing. So we added a step: rewrite every finding in your own words in Cornell Notes. Slower, but the notes started to mean something.
Groups could not picture what “good” looked like from instructions. Once we posted two finished maps on the wall, the next round improved on its own.
So we set a rule: don't print it, and don't leave an iPad at the station running the slides. Canva was a checklist for tracking tasks and keeping work moving between classes. The station was what visitors saw, not the screen.
Cardboard vanished, tape ran out, tables were a mess. We taught the routine directly: where things live, how to take and return them, and the rule that you plan before you build.
The artifacts that worked were the ones students had to touch — move a sticky, fill a gap in the table, check off a fix, rewrite a line. When the wall asked for an action, the kids used it.
Feedback should lead to change.