Technology — Design, Make, and Innovate · Phase 3

“Clarity of purpose and relevance derive from stakeholder values, historical influences, and cultural contexts.”

This is the unit's anchor: Lesson 1's empathy interviews surface a user's values, and the pre-colonial kūmara case study reads design as shaped by place and by prior observation.

📑 All six verified statements, each against the lesson that teaches it →

Three pathways that go deeper into the same design process rather than adding unrelated work. Each one reuses a tool ākonga already know from Lessons 1–5, so the extension is more practice at thinking, not a new set of instructions.

Entry-level — Interview one more user

Ākonga run a second empathy interview (Lesson 1) with someone outside their original user group: a younger student, a caretaker, a whānau member. They add the new observations to their empathy map and mark which of their original insights survived contact with a different person. Deliverable: an updated empathy map with the new voice in a different colour, and one sentence naming what changed.

Developing — Test the same prototype against a second POV

Using the Point-of-View statement method from Lesson 2, ākonga write a second POV for a different user, then test their existing prototype against it without rebuilding. The point is to discover that a design fit for one user often fails another, and to say why in the language of needs rather than preferences. Deliverable: a second Feedback Capture Grid (Lesson 5) plus a short written judgement — does this design serve both users, one, or neither?

Mastery — Run the full cycle on a real school problem

Ākonga apply the whole sequence to a live problem in the school that a named person actually has: queue congestion, a lost-property system, a shared space nobody uses. They must interview that person, define a POV and How Might We question, prototype once, test with the same person, and iterate. Where the design touches shared space or tikanga, they check with the appropriate staff member before proposing it. Deliverable: a one-page design case: POV, HMW, prototype photo, what the user did, what changed, and what they would test next.

The five lessons are one pass through the design thinking cycle, and each one hands the next its raw material. Nothing here works as a standalone lesson: Lesson 3 has nothing to ideate about without Lesson 2's problem statement, and Lesson 5 has nothing to test without Lesson 4's model.

• 📖 Lesson 1 — Empathise: ākonga interview a real user and build an empathy map, learning that design starts with listening rather than with a solution.
• 📖 Lesson 2 — Define: the empathy map becomes a Point-of-View statement and a How Might We question, so the class is solving a stated problem rather than a guessed one.
• 📖 Lesson 3 — Ideate: divergent brainstorming against that HMW question, then a convergent vote under real constraints, ending with one committed concept.
• 📖 Lesson 4 — Prototype: ākonga name the assumption they most need to test, then build a low-fidelity model fast enough that they are willing to be wrong about it.
• 📖 Lesson 5 — Test: the original user meets the prototype. Ākonga observe in silence, sort the response into a Feedback Capture Grid, and justify one iteration with evidence rather than taste.

Where it goes next. The habit this unit builds — define before you solve, test before you commit — transfers directly into the technology strand's design brief work and into any inquiry where students propose a change. Ākonga who want the same cycle at greater depth should take the Mastery extension above and run it on a live school problem with a named user.