As a new teacher, I faced the same dilemma every fall: What to put on the walls of my classroom? On the one hand, I didn’t want to clutter the space with posters that had no meaningful connection to my new students. On the other hand, bare walls can feel sterile and unwelcoming—a classroom is meant to be a shared learning space, not an Apple Store.
Those early days of worry and anxiety are behind me, because now, every wall in my classroom is a “tribute wall,” covered with displays celebrating past exhibitions, competitions, and artifacts of student learning. I call them tribute walls because each display is a tribute to a now-finished project.
The walls are engaging and memory-rich, evoking not just the triumphant conclusion, but also the messy middle of the design process. Students are able to share their learning with others by referring to artifacts that have meaning and memories associated with them. The tribute walls also serve to introduce my classroom to families, future students, and visitors from the community. Visitors say things like, “My sister was on that team!” and ask questions about how the artifacts worked.
I didn’t come up with the idea of a tribute wall (though as far as I know, I did come up with the name). I was inspired to create them after visiting the headquarters of Medtronic, a health technology company. I was impressed by their display walls showcasing medical devices that now seem primitive, as well as nanotechnology that anticipates the future of health care.
In my teaching, I use tribute walls as references, providing models that demonstrate various simple machines (inclined plane, pulley, lever, etc.).
The artifacts emerged from ideas, and the tributes afford opportunity to remember and share these. The corporal presence of stuff elicits observations and questions. Opportunities are created for students to tell their stories—and they are so proud of their work. Maybe that pride and student voice is the elixir that makes an artifact a tribute. Some of these tributes went up in under an hour. Others took far too long. To provide you with inspiration (and some “how-to” advice) I highlight two student-designed tributes that were learning-rich and (fairly) easy to create.
This tribute captures work produced for the Engineering Machine Design Contest (EMDC), a regional competition in which my students took part.
In the EMDC, teams of students work to build a low-cost, theme-based machine, and compete against other teams from Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Iowa. The maximum size the machines can be is 5 ft x 5 ft x 5 ft, which means that once the competition is over, a machine can be disassembled and displayed in a way that explains both its design and design process.
Team Peace at the EMDC
This photo shows a student team (they called themselves “Team Peace”) building their machine for the EMDC. The theme of this year’s competition was Energy, and Team Peace designed a machine to establish secure and independent energy sources for Ukraine.
Team Peace’s Tribute Wall
After the competition, Team Peace disassembled their machine and decided which components were most important to display. They also figured out how to work within the available display space.
Before the installation, students set up a “dry fit” in which they arrange the components as they will be displayed, without using adhesive (which means they need to lay pieces down on a horizontal surface before hanging them on a wall). The dry fit is critiqued by peers, staff, and other experts, and students make adjustments before moving on to the permanent installation.
Annual Day at the Launches is the culmination of an engineering project in which students design and test prototype paper rockets, and ultimately build rockets propelled by solid fuel. Because we are located in Minnesota, this event usually occurs in May, after the snow and ice have melted and state testing is in the rearview mirror. Assessment is simple: Were the launch and recovery successful?
The tribute wall is a combination of rocket drawings (for example, fin design and placement), data collection, prototypes, and actual rockets launched.
A student with his rocket at Annual Day at the Launches
Students pose next to promotional signs they made at the last minute!
For the tribute walls, students choose what to display in order to tell the story of their design process, from initial drawings to flight-ready rockets. Over the years, students have chosen to display the rockets themselves, as well as paper prototypes, data collection documents, and photographs they used for inspiration.
Below, you can see a tribute wall created in a hallway, and one in a computer lab. We mounted the rockets on the fin alignment guides that students used to make the rockets.
Hallway tribute wall (front view)
Hallway tribute wall (side view)
Computer lab tribute wall
These projects are hard to do. Every year there is a certain amount of chaos, and a lot of failure—a necessary part of the iterative design process, but it’s still hard for the students (and me!) to deal with. And so, every year I think, “Do I really want to go through all that again?” The tribute walls remind me how much the students learned in previous years, and give me the energy I need to do it all over.
For further inspiration, I re-read Ron Berger’s book, An Ethic of Excellence: Building a Culture of Craftsmanship, and visit High Tech High in San Diego (especially in the midst of a Minnesota winter).
And every year, the repository grows and new tributes fill the walls, drawing former and future students into the warmth of their learning—places of past celebration and future possibility.
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