The Analogy Exercise

Well I conducted another 2 workshops at Singapore Polytechnic over the last 2 weeks and thought of sharing the lesson approach as several of my readers mentioned that they benefitted from the description of the previous workshop (Index Card Lesson) that I conducted.

As most of you might already know, I engineer creative lessons which get the students engaged in a fun activity, and these 2 latest workshops were no different. For the second workshop in the series (the next one after the Index Card Lesson), the objective was to inculcate the awareness and importance of structure when preparing presentations for clients.

The students needed to understand that not everything in the documentation ends up in the presentation and consequently also needed practice in sieving out the vital information to be presented as well.

After some thought, I came up with a simple idea that could help the students assess their projects in a different perspective whilst addressing the above needs. I created an activity in which the students would explain their project using an analogy. The basic premise was that the students would need to consider their project details and extract the key points to be translated into a description of a sport.

The analogy would limit the amount of info that could be brought over from the project specifications into the sport elements and it would also give the students an opportunity to visualise their projects in a different context.

I scaffolded the task, giving a structured example for their understanding of what was to be done and then allowed their creativity and sense of adventure take over. The students did not disappoint and the following are the analogies as presented by the 5 groups of students (click on image to read the students' work).


The students had a good time preparing the analogies and then the fun experience of sharing their analogies (lots of laughs here). And as can be clearly seen from the descriptions, they were able to think out of the box and produce quite interesting analogies overall.