David requests that students design
an instruction manual for the Thai
children so they might know how
to use the playground equipment,
but there is a catch: The children in
Thailand don’t speak English, so the
instructions must only use drawings
and universal symbols, no words.
Designing for
Play
Brainstorming and Research
Once students understood the
problem, we did a bit of communal
research. We began by drawing a
familiar piece of playground equipment on the board—a seesaw—and
discussed how we might use it: How
many people do you need to play on a
seesaw? What do you do once you are
on it? Which way does it move? How
can we show that movement in our
design drawings? Is there a specific
order to how we use the equipment?
Many students used arrows and
numbers to show which directions to
go and where to start. Every now and
then students would draw a person
on a jungle gym in the middle of the
ladder and I would ask them, “ How
did that person get up there? Is that
where you first get on?” These kinds
of questions helped students think
through what they were drawing.
world I was living in. Bringing that
experience back to my classroom in
the United States, I wanted to challenge my students to use universal
images to communicate across cul-
tural and lin-
Students rose to the design guistic boundar-
challenge, taking their intuitive ies.
knowledge of play and
transforming it into dynamic
instructional drawings.
Brian Hutcheson
For two years, I lived in Bangkok, Thailand, and had the
opportunity to
experience living in a culture
very different
from my own.
Everywhere I
went, people
were speaking a foreign language
and most signs and advertisements
were written in a script that was
completely indecipherable to me. To
my relief, I often encountered universal images that were designed to
help people like me navigate the new
Design Brief
To introduce
this lesson to
my second-
grade students, I created a fictional
letter from a friend named David,
who lives in Thailand. In the letter, David explains that he lives in a
remote part of Thailand and that the
children in his area have just received
a new set of playground equipment.
Generating Solutions
Students created accordion books
for their instruction manuals, and
on each page they drew their wordless illustrations showing how to
use a slide, a jungle gym, a swing,
and a fourth piece of equipment of
their choice. On the cover of the
instruction manuals, they drew an
image that reminded them of the
playground. Many students chose
to repeat an image they drew from
inside their instruction manual.
Evaluating Solutions
Many students were eager to send
their instructions to Thailand, so
I had to reluctantly remind them
that the letter was a pretend letter. It
seems that creating a realistic con-
