Driving Question: How can I learn about music theory and teach others by analyzing Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata?

Module Overview: For this project, Diego learned about music theory by researching chords, scales, and sheet music elements like clefs, staff, accidentals, and dynamic markings. Diego then analyzed and played Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata to identify the elements used in this song.

Project Reflection: “I didn’t feel this project was work. I thought it more like a hobby, just one more day doing what I like. I learned many things that I didn’t know about the theory, even though I have been playing the piano for several years now. It is the first time that I have shown many people what I can do or play, and that’s really exciting to finally share.”

Driving Question:How can we convey the complexities of ethnic and religious reconciliation through our experience of Bosnia and Herzegovina?

Students Lexie and Gigi decided to tackle an art form that was new to them for their project: crafting a mosaic. The project was filled with symbolism: breaking the tiles represented the destruction that took place during the 90s conflict. Putting the tiles back together in the shape of Bosnia showed that with hard work and time (and given that this was a new art form for the two of them, it required a lot of hard work and time), Bosnia can one again become, regardless of age, culture, ethnicity, or religion.

Lexie and Gigi visited Bosniak mosques, Serbian Orthodox churches, and Croatian Catholic churches to understand what color tiles to use in the mosaic. They learned that green is an essential color in Islam and is Muhammad’s favorite color, that Orthodox churches are often very colorful, and that Croatian Catholic churches heavily feature whites and golds.

Once they had identified color schemes and prominent designs, they created patterns based on what they had seen during their scouting process and featuring the colors mentioned above. Once the tiles were created, they smashed them into pieces (90s destruction). Next, they combined the colored elements with white tiles to form the outline of Bosnia and Herzegovina. To finish the piece, Lexie and Gigi grouted the gaps and glossed the top to make everything shine.

Driving Question: How can we convey the complexities of ethnic and religious reconciliation through our experience of Bosnia and Herzegovina?

For her summative assessment, Class of 2021 student Malak B. went an artful route by working on a series of pictures of Bosnian strangers. Each held up a flower representing a value that they believe leads to reconciliation, along with a description of why they hold that belief.

The end project demonstrated how different people in Bosnia and Herzegovina hold different views on reaching reconciliation. In the end, it turns out, no matter their ethnicity, everyone strives towards the same goal.

Driving Question: How can I become proficient in Australian slang through art?

Class of 2021 student Gigi E. designed her project on Australian slang and how it has become a part of the country’s identity. Her goal was to become competent and confident in communicating slang with the local community. She demonstrated this by creating a mini dictionary documenting Australian slang terms she learned through interactions with the locals. 

“To further my understanding of Australian Slang, I thought there was no better source than the people of Australia themselves. Today I went around Scape and talked to people about their favorite Australian slang words. It was interesting to see how many of the terms that I already knew. Just from my experiences with Lexie and Elyce, I was able to learn a lot more terms than I thought I did. 

The first people I interviewed were the people at the reception at Scape. They were able to confirm a bunch of the other terms that I had in my initial entries. This helped me know that they are still relevant and used today. One new word that they told me (which is now one of my favorite terms) is Eshay, a wannabe teenage gangster. They were able to show us pictures of what they meant and it was quite funny to walk around the city and recognize them on the streets.”

Driving Question: How can I use creative art practices to engage in discourse and dialogue on counterculture, social justice or everyday life through zines?

Project Description:

In this module I made a zine (book) about the life of Rupert Murdoch, why he does what he does, and how his influence works.

Quote:

I learned that with a little bit of inspiration and a non-judgemental audience, art becomes a lot easier.

Driving Question: How can we think critically to effectively inform citizens in a media manipulated world?

Summative Assessment: You can find their final product on Instagram.

What were your goals for this module? How did you achieve them?

Our goal was to change the narrative behind protest art being seen as performative and vandalism. We want to show the impact protest art had on protest movements, so we decided to create an Instagram page where we showed examples of its impact and us breaking down the narrative.

What did you learn about yourself or about your creative process or about your medium?

We learned key social media skills on how to present an idea on a platform such as Instagram and how social media can be used to inform people on important matters.

Driving Question: How might we collaboratively implement a design-thinking process to meet the needs of the community we serve?

What were your goals for this module? How did you achieve them?

For this module, we all had a common goal, create a fun product for young people that will help them connect with themselves, so we produced a notebook with a lot of cool stuff in it.

What did you learn about yourself or about your creative process or about your medium?

I enjoyed researching and designing the driving questions for the journal. It was really insightful for me because I was basing what we had learned from the interviews and shaping it into something our users could interact with. I like that we were able to refine our product based on the feedback we got. At first, I thought that it would be hard to change all our work for the comments, but it turns out that it was beneficial. It made our vibey journal better.

Driving Question: How might we collaboratively implement a design-thinking process to meet the needs of the community we serve?

What were your goals for this module? How did you achieve them?

The team’s main goal was to work collaboratively to achieve maximum efficacy and the best results. When we wrote the agreement, we all shared the same ideas of working in a team. We all liked working with people, but we all had concerns because the 3 of us have had somewhat bad experiences with people working on a team. However, the group bonded really well and really quickly, and that gave us a huge advantage because we knew we could trust each other, which led to more effective and fun work sessions. Also, the 3 of us wanted to work in all aspects of the project; we did not want to split roles. That’s why the 3 of us collaborated in all five parts of the design thinking process, and we did not split the work; we worked together.

What did you learn about yourself or about your creative process or about your medium?

The team thought this was a huge learning experience and the 3 of us learned a lot about ourselves and how we collaborate. In addition, we learned a lot about architecture and design, considering our project lied in those fields. We learned that designing plans for a school is challenging, especially when you have to meet certain criteria for the people you are working for. We also learned that we are good collaborators because some team members thought that they were bad at working in teams. We think that the most valuable thing we learned was how to create a professional but at the same time laid back team environment that archives good efficacy. The team dynamic that we created was very effective. We can attribute its success to the agreement that we wrote and the meetings we had before actually starting to work on the project.

What did this project mean to you?

We all felt very excited about working on this project as it was both a cool opportunity to use skills we were interested in and create physical change, as well as being able to work with an organization that one of us knew personally. While the end result of this project may be years down the line, it feels good to create something that may become reality due in part to our design.

Driving Question: How can I develop and combine a well-designed and written book which conveys, in a simple but significant way, part of someone’s TGS story and experiences, by the perspective of the others?

My final product: I created a book in which TGS community members (including alumni) share stories, moments and memories with Karen, Elyce and Jamie. We didn’t have the change to properly say goodbye, and show our appreciation. So, this is a way to convey our gratitude.

Take Part in the Project: Visit the Asombro Website

Driving Question: How might we collaboratively implement a design thinking process to meet the needs of the community we serve?

What were your goals for this module? How did you achieve them?

Our collective goal was to make a fun product that could potentially boost the mental health of teenagers all around the world aged 13-17. We did it by creating Asombro – a collection of jars filled with surprising prompts suiting every person’s individual interests. Asja created the jars; Dia the website, the Instagram account, and the logo; Viktoria did the prompts.

What did you learn about yourself or about your creative process or about your medium?

We learned how to apply design-thinking into making something into reality, and figured in the end that following a structured way of creating a product made the process a lot easier. Our team will definitely apply design-thinking skills to our future projects. We took into account our stakeholder’s needs by conducting over 20 empathy interviews and went through feedback sessions, and got a lot of positive responses regarding the idea. 

What did this project mean to you?

It meant a lot, each of us learned something new about ourselves.