End of Chapter One

Session #8 brings this Big Time chapter to an end…for now…Today’s goal was to wrap everything up; to reflect on the last seven sessions and to dream up what could be for possible future sessions, whether they would be in the Spring, one year from now, or in a decade.

IMG_2748

Here’s the shared google doc with our ideas:

https://docs.google.com/a/lrei.org/document/d/1ljmb5FkI-IABTiUiq_-n8H1GQU3LmSWbuL2f5H67Rmo/edit

Among other things…

Olivia discovered that there was once a frappuccino invented that was 128 ounces, and $54.75 with 60 shots of espresso. We’re not sure who would want something that that could send you to the hospital with an extremely elevated heart rate, while breaking the bank, but at least we know that the sky’s the limit, even for frappuccinos.

Gwen thinks that weather.weatherbug.com is the best website and app out there. In her opinion, it has more practical and accurate info.

Luke actually has a personal connection to the owner of the Ferrari company! Over our time, Jack and Luke have started with separate ideas, then they joined forces, and now they’ve started to swap ideas. It’s not stealing when you’re inspired by a friend!

IMG_2749

Our Chromebooks have turned out to be an excellent resource for these kinds of student driven projects!

It has been great to gather all of our ideas: hard copies, digital resources, info from adventurous outings and experiments, and our imaginations and then lay everything out for review.

IMG_2750

Sophie, Olivia, Alexa, and Caroline have been blow away at some of possible frappuccino flavors. Their next step is to invent and experiment with their own flavors and then take things to the next level by thinking about how small business run.

All in all, this has been an absolutely fantastic experience. This ground breaking, student driven work has been enormously helpful and inspiring for the future of work and life in the LREI Middle School.

Thank you, Caroline, Jack, Luke, Alexa, Gwen, Sophie, and Olivia!

 

Sure Shot

Today, we had the pleasure of following some of Alexa’s ideas. Alexa’s desire was to find some sort of formula to make the perfect basketball shot. The possibilities have gradually evolved from, “Can I figure out a mathematical formula to guarantee a basket?” to, “Could I design a robot to do this?” to a clearer, “Can I use friends, math, and athletics to improve my own shooting percentage?”

We grabbed a measuring tape, some sidewalk chalk, and a bunch of basketballs and got to work:

Luke shot Gwen shot Jack shot Caroline:Olivia shot

The chalk came in handy to keep track of statistics:

chalk 1

This brought up questions about fractions related to percentages:

chalk 3

The measuring tape helped to keep track of height and distance, all important factors:

measuring

The 4′ 9″ Gwen shot a fantastic eight for ten from about eleven and a half feet away, using the backboard each and every time. Nearby, at a distance of 11′ 10″ away, Caroline shot a 70% success rate with five out of seven being backboard shots. Backboard: Friend or enemy???

Next, Jack became Alexa’s guinea pig when he discovered that, to his own surprise, he shot 0/5 straight on, 1/5 on a diagonal, and an impressive 4/5 from the side, all from three point range.

It was great to see everyone working so well together while having fun:

all

Alexa ended up compiling quite a bit of data and discovered that in a process like this, one might actually change her original vision to something new and equally exciting:

data Who knows what will happen next?

 

 

Maserati Time

Jack came up with the idea to visit the Maserati store. It’s relatively in the neighborhood. The question for Jack then became, “How can I be inspired to design an affordable, safe sports car by studying the design of an expensive sports car?”

For everyone else, the questions became, “How can we look at a luxury Italian sports car’s design, be inspired by their design, and transfer the information into other designs like basketball shoes, interior design, coffee shops, frappuccinos, and more?

Here we are:

All store

Jack found his favorite cruise pretty quickly:

Jack

Jack was drawn to this one because “it’s sporty, has two doors, and I like the matte black color.” Luke thought it would be cool to study their tires and design a basketball shoe out of Maserati tires.

We met the friendly Maserati dealer, David (super cool name), who informed the students that each and every car is hand made. The aluminum is actually bent and shaped accordingly by hand and with tools. To top it off, all of the interior chairs are hand stitched.

Interior

Check out the clocks on the dashboard. They’re analog, not digital!

Whoa! This lead to more questions: “How long does it take to make just one car?” “Start to finish- nine months,” David answered. The attention to detail was really admirable and produced beautiful results.

Sophie was inspired by the color and material choices. This could come in handy with interior bedroom design:

Sophie Colors

Alexa and Caroline decided they want to buy this one:

Alexa Caroline

And Olivia and Sophie plan to drive this one across the country with the top down, regardless of weather:

Sophie Olivia

Today’s visit added to some wonderings that Alexa has been pondering: “Once a formula was calculated for a robot to make a perfect basketball shot, could the formula be transferred over to a human?”

The possibilities are exciting and endless!

 

Cafe Inspiration

They’ve been working hard. So, there was only one thing to do next: Go to Starbucks!

Group

Why Starbucks? It’s in the neighborhood. As far as design is concerned, Starbucks is really doing something right. It’s a huge, worldwide franchise, and yet no two Starbucks are laid out exactly the same. We observed that they design according to the confines of the architecture of the building. And besides, inspiration has long been found in cafes.

Once we all ordered a beverage, we noticed some things:

Clover Machine

This fancy “Clover” machine makes one cup at a time. Slowly and deliberately. It needed lots of attention from one of the baristas. How can they serve so many people with this? There are LOTS of drinks on the menu.

And then came a big distraction:

Jake & Gwen

Jack and Gwen were now “Jake” and “Wen”?!?

Olivia

Olivia is “Oliver”?!?!?!?

We had to laugh. And this point of screwing up names ended up being brought up again later.

Next, all of the students were challenged to look at the layout of the store, critically. They noticed the flow of the customers, the shapes of the furniture and lights, and the synergy between the employees and the machines.

One noticed, “Wait. Why do they call it ‘tall’? Shouldn’t they just call it a ‘small’ since it’s the smallest size?” When I asked, why he thought Starbucks chose ‘tall’, the student’s answer was clear: “Because it makes it sound bigger.” Is bigger always better? You heard it hear from a Big Timer.

The challenge now was, “If you had your own coffee shop, what ideas would you steal from Starbucks and what would you change?”

One response was, “If I had a coffee shop, I would call my small sizes the French word for ‘small’ to make it sound fancy.” “Petite!”, another said. Is fancier better? These are things to consider when designing just about anything. From drinks to coffee shops and even shoes, cars, bedrooms, basketball formulas, and weather satellites.

We would keep:

  • The long, wooden community table, the overall “cozy” feeling, the grey colors and modern look, the cool light fixtures, the spectrum coffee diagram, and the good music.

We would change:

  • Improving customer service so they’d get everyone’s name right on the cups!

Goals for next week include:

  • Caroline will research coffee shop dimensions and regulations.
  • Olivia is going grocery shopping to experiment with her own frappuccino recipe.
  • Alexa may inquire with Jeremiah about building a robot that could shoot a mini basketball.
  • Gwen wants to research where the NY1 Studios are, maybe start on a 3D model of her satellite, and look up Neil deGrasse Tyson.
  • Sophie is going to Pottery Barn’s teen website where she can create digital layouts of her own room design: http://www.pbteen.com/design-studio/?cm_type=gnav
  • Luke is going to bring in old basketball shoes to dissect.
  • Jack is going to research about the local Maserati for a possible visit and he’ll also check out http://www.audiusa.com/

 

 

Design Lab Videos

Here, Jack and Luke join forces on the basketball design:

Jack and Luke

Next, Sophie shares her dream bedroom design. She plans on turning it into a reality when her apartment is renovated next summer:

Sophie

And Alexa shares her hopefully surefire plan to shoot a basketball successfully into the hoop each and every time:

Alexa

Gwen, the meteorologist, shows her draft of the weather satellite of the future:

Gwen

Thirsty? Olivia invented a new and creepy coffeehouse-style beverage:

Olivia

And finally, speaking of coffee houses, Caroline introduces you to her very own coffee house design:

Caroline

It’s almost frightening how alive these ideas have started to become. What started as a tiny seed of curiosity has now started to truly take off. It will be interesting to see how the next steps inform the future of the projects and research. Will things go as planned? Will “disappointments” or surprises wind up opening new doors? Will unexpected educational disruptions be embraced? Time will tell. BIG TIME.

Design Time

We discovered that design was a common theme between many, if not all of these sixth graders’ interests and ideas. It wasn’t planned, it just came up. Works in progress being explored:

-Basketball Shoe and Sock Design…Complete with air pump. I have a feeling the colors may be intense.

Shoe

-Frappuccino design (“Vampire Frap”)…Mmmm, cherry at the bottom, lemon in the middle, and mystery black on top.

Frap

-Interior Design…Dreaming up the perfect layout of a bedroom.

Bed

-Coffee Shop Design…Will there be actual cats in this store?

Shop

-Basketball Shot Design…Exploring the physics and mathematical calculations of making a basket every time.

B ball

-Affordable Sports Car Design…Can it be fun and safe without breaking the bank?

Car

-Meteorology Design…A weather machine that predicts with 100% accuracy AND can travel to other planets to report back the weather there.

Machine

Within the world of design, various topics of discussion came up while drawing: feng shui, choosing the right colors, shopping at Trader Joe’s versus shopping at Whole Foods, and high school and college basketball court design versus pro NBA design.

Next week, we will continue answering specific questions about the next steps to take for each project with this worksheet:

BT 3 worksheet

Steps to the Pitch

Worksheet

 

I felt that it was important for me to not give too much information with these simple directions. I really wanted it to be wide open for the 6th graders. If a question or step felt vague, then we could start to prod the question and ask, “But why are you interested in this?”

There was definitely a bit of honest confusion over what we were doing exactly. The kids were also a tad concerned with comparing themselves to other advisories and they wondered if the others were having more fun and doing things like, “going to Starbucks.” This comes in to play again later…

Questioning

Next, the brainstorming started to flow nicely. Kids have questions…lots of questions. Part of the fun challenge was coming up up with honest questions that lead to even bigger, more significant questions and first steps.

For example, “How are basketball shoes made?” was an initial question. The related first step written down to this question was, “Buy shoes and look at them.” After a brief and friendly chuckle, I started asking the student more questions: “What else could you do beside look at the shoes?” This lead to the student asking, “How can I learn more about the design of these shoes? Who do I contact? Nike? The guys who make the shoes? Could I be a designer some day?” OK, now we’re cookin’. Could I have possibly seen a child’s future career blossom before my eyes in a span of six seconds?!?

Steps

 

These Big Timers took this quite seriously and took their time. I think that because these interests were so personal and close to their hearts, they took some extra care with these questions and steps.

Pitch Meeting

This may have been the best part. We talked about what a “pitch meeting” is and how to pitch an idea. We pretended that I was a fancy business man with a zillion dollars. We also pretended that I was super connected to lots of experts from around the world. If students could clearly articulate their curiosities and passions in a way that sounded workable, I would offer them endless resources. It was great practice to clearly explain their questions and next steps to each other in the group.

“Starbucks” (I told you it would come back) led to “Oh! Maybe some day I’ll want to open up my own coffee shop! I wonder how I can do that!” Three pitches overlapped with the theme of “design”: Interior design, shoe design, and designing affordable cars. Two overlapped with “basketball”: sock and shoe design, and the physics of making a basket. The latter was essentially asking, “Could knowledge of physics trump athleticism…or are great athletes actually expert physicists in disguise?” It’s exciting to think that they could begin as a researching trio or duo and then break off on their own searches.

Lastly, a curiosity about meteorology led to wonderings about the latest in weather technology and how amazing it that someone can actually predict the future with a decent degree of accuracy. After just a little more prodding, we realized that a meteorologist could not only have a cool job with a green screen, but they could also be instrumental in helping the world on to a path of reversing climate change. Big change starts with small ideas.

 

Eating Candy and Other Talents…

 

I am interested in...

I am interested in…

It started simply. So simply that students appeared to be simultaneously confused and yet thrilled. It was wide open. “You mean we can choose literally anything in the world that we’re interested in?” “Yes. Nothing is wrong.” It was a kid’s dream. Ideas ranged from basketball to “how my brain works”. These sixth graders loved reading what each other wrote and they just had to know who the author was for each one. I realized that, not only was this an exercise in the students getting to know themselves and follow their own interests, but they also got to know each other better. Hopefully this will also make for better collaborations down the road.

I am good at...

I am good at…

“And it’s OK to brag,” the experienced Gwen informed her friends. She was right. Gwen had helped us out earlier this summer during the Innovation Institute’s first meetings. Now is the time to show off and it’s really quite exciting to actually see how much talent is in the room via the green post it notes. Several comments read things like “Eating candy” and “Eating triple layer cake”. What felt almost a little silly from the students’ points of view to write such things actually led to interesting conversations about someday possibly being a chef or even a sommelier. No, I am not encouraging sixth graders to try wine, but they were fascinated to hear about the level sophistication and study someone must dive into in order to recommend a wine in a fancy restaurant. A follow up question to these discussions might be, “What do you think your next step might be to learn more about what it takes to be an expert food taster?”

I am curious about...

I am curious about…

This may have been the best part. It seemed to be a combination of the previous posts and the next steps as well. Several students noted “basketball” on their initial post it’s. By the blue notes during this third round, the posts became more specific and varied: “Shoes and socks” led to a conversation about combining science, design, and fashion to best make an athlete jump higher and look good while doing it. “Shooting basketballs from close range” could have led to a conversation about conditioning, physics, good practice habits, and more.

Endless possibilities...

Endless possibilities…

“Me” was a note that revealed itself to be a conversation about adoption, biological parents, heritage and beyond. Essentially, “Who am I?” and “What am I capable of?” seemed to be the questions inadvertently asked by all. It was a pleasant surprise and the kids were clearly hungry for what will come next!