Microteach reflections

Getting involved in the microteach day with my group at LCC was a great experience. In my planning leading up to my 20 minute session I wanted to focus on trying something new with a group that I hadn’t tested out before. As intellectual property can be a complicated topic to get your head around in the first instance I set to work on creating a simple card game that might help people with understanding the key elements. The focus for the microteach session was on object based learning which was an exciting spin on things because this is something that I haven’t applied to my IP education as of yet.

I started the task by asking the group to have a look in their bag for something that might be protected by an IP right and we got lots of wonderfully random responses! I was able to respond to these to get the ball rolling with individuals understanding of IP in context. Understanding the different IP rights is all well and good but the key for my work at UAL is context.

Presenting the card game:

There are 4 cards in a matching set – 1 pink (IP right), 1 blue (what can be protected), 1 purple (timeline), 1 orange (example). The aim of the game is to gather together four sets of four cards. On paper this may seem relatively straightforward but in practice it proved quite a challenge. Once you’ve completed your four sets of cards you need to rummage around in your bag to find one object that can be protected by each of the rights – copyright, patent, design right and trademark.

I was pleased to get some really positive feedback from my peers which included ‘working with the cards was engaging and informative – leading to discussions and thinking about IP’ (Ike). Tim’s feedback on my activity really got me thinking about how I could create differentiation even within this simple activity and included ‘lots of clarity here in the ‘transparent teaching’ methods – all the cards are on the table so to speak!’.

Key takeaways:

• think about how I introduce and explain the card game. Rather than the approach of ‘here are some cards, it’s pretty straightforward so off you go’ I need to think about introducing what and why to the group before I set them on the task.
• from watching a group of students engage with the activity I was able to see that there were actually lots of different ways of working with the cards. For example, I could hand out only two colours of the cards and students start with this which is a simpler approach.
• I could definitely do this activity with or without the cards, from testing the session with this group of students I learned that just the mere act of getting something that might be protected by IP out of your bag and discussing it can be a great activity in itself (and would have saved me a lot of time laminating my cards!).