Design Program Launch

Today was the Design Thinking program’s launch day. It was our first big event. I’ve taught classes and run short programs, but this was the first time we’ve had a celebrity judge — an architect and member of our board — a number of parents in attendance, and all the middle school grades represented.

Our problem or challenge was this — how can the school reduce its energy costs and electrical costs?. We had three teams, ranging from a three person team hastily assembled, to a sixth grade team that had been planning and communicating (can I say scheming? I think so) all week despite the power outages.

We started a little late, shortly after 1pm today. I presented the nature of design challenges very frankly. “welcome to the design challenge. Why design? Because you have to invent a solution. Why challenge? Because none of the adults in this room can tell you how to solve this problem — we don’t know either.”

I think there was a little frisson of excitement and concern at that. Maybe concern. Maybe confusion — when do teachers admit they don’t know? Rarely. When do we let children work on real-world problems with no correct answers? Only in Ender’s Game.

At periodic intervals, I stopped the teams and asked them to think about one of the stages of the design process. Some of the steps in design process are short. If you’ve done your homework, they take ten minutes or less. Others can take forty minutes or more. And as designers know, sometimes the individual steps and sub-steps can take years or more.

My main goal was to make sure that students got a chance to go through the whole process, beginning to end, in three hours. They succeeded in that. And all of the kids seemed to “get” why we adults think this is so important. All the kids claimed, in the moment, that they wanted to do this again.

But what really got me was seeing how many parents came to the wrap up and how many of them left getting the idea of design as a tool for the future. Several parents said it explicitly: “I love watching my kid solve our most serious problems the way I do at work. I wish we did this at work more often than we do.”

Several of my colleagues left the event looking more bought in, too. It’s not that they didn’t believe it before, but maybe they didn’t believe I could do it. I think I’m over that hurdle, at least.

Theres no food at home, so I’m eating in a restaurant tonight. This kid at a nearby table is angsting about an iPhone app that doesn’t work the way it should. She wants it changed. That shows that kids are hungry for this, here and everywhere. I think design will work for my school now. I’m no longer worried that we can make this work at some point in the future.  Rather, I’m excited that we HAVE made it work, and can continue to make it work going forward.

From the sewing machine: notebooks

From the sewing machine: notebooks

Originally uploaded by anselm23

Update:

So many people have come to my blog about these small sewn notebooks that it seems appropriate to provide links to some of the things I’ve worked on IN them, like the Mansions of the Moon, and the related arts curriculum that goes with them; and thinking about a medieval curriculum in the modern world; and developing the Palace of Memory; for a while I was also making my own Tarot cards.

Via Flickr:
This week I made about thirty small notebooks from some scrap paper I’ve had hanging around the design lab. The paper is folded in half – lighter sheets for writing on, inside; and heavier colored cardstock on the outside. The fold is then unfolded, and run through the sewing machine. Each book has seven sheets of paper, so fourteen pages inclidkng the covers….

I gave away most of the notebooks I made as Design Lab favors, but I kept these seven small notebooks, measuring about 8″x5″, for myself. They are covered with colors in keeping with the traditional colors of the days of the week. I plan to use them to create a series of collections of poetry and art relating to the planets for which the days of the week are named. I’m about a third of the way through writing the Sunday book — partly because I’d already assembled the material, and had a plan for this one anyway. The others will be a bit more of a challenge.

If you had a classroom sewing machine, you could ask students to put together anthologies of their favorite poems, or do the page layout to a favored story. Or you could bind pages together for handouts in a way that suggested greater value than a mere staple…

Abandoned bookmark

Abandoned bookmark

Originally uploaded by anselm23

Via Flickr:
I found this bookmark abandoned in the library. One side of it was a cute picture of a dog with its head tilted as it looked into an open book. The dog might have been wearing glasses.

The other side had this elegant doodle, done during a teacher presentation, I imagine. Who says drawing isn’t an important skill?