Trello

Every year at my school, KIS International School, students in the IB Middle Years Programme are grouped across grade levels and participate in an event called Design Cycle Challenge (DCC). It lasts for a week and students have to follow the design cycle and apply knowledge and concepts from different academic subjects. I consider this is a STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) project. It is truly exciting to see students use various learning skills through this collaborative building process. This year, students were asked to build a boat by using recycled water bottles, environmentally friendly foam sheets, strings and cloth tapes.

In the past few years, the problem we had was to ensure that every student in the group contributed to the project and shared responsibilities. In order to solve this problem and help each student stayed productive in their groups, we decided to use Trello this year. In short, Trello is an organization tool that allows users to set tasks and monitor the progress of their work. It can also be used as a collaboration tool which allow users to share tasks with people involved in the same project. 

It was a success for students to use Trello for collaboration and organization. It also made it easier for supervisors to monitor progresses of teams. We created 34 teams for the DCC and each team was assigned a board to plan their boat building. Each team used Trello to record their iterative working process as a group, such as creating checklists, using comment function for brainstorming ideas, deciding due dates for specific tasks, and so on. Initially, we gave students three lists: To-do, Doing and Done. After students became more familiar with Trello, they started to organized their lists independently.   

Here is a tutorial guide that we created to show students how to use Trello: