Driving Question: What are the unique properties of a meal/dish from my culture and how can I share that with the world?

Project Description: This module was about exploring my culture and highlighting our unique characteristics. They could be from language or family to religion and traditions. I was looking for a dish that is important to me and represents a big part of my culture. My final product for the project is a video explaining the importance of my dish, pan de muerto, and how to do it step by step.

Project Reflection: “I enjoyed learned about my culture and the origin of many of my traditions. Baking pan de muerto and recording the process was challenging and exciting at the same time. I learned how to communicate in a simple and interesting way.” -Marily

Driving Question: How can I address some of the present threats to global health while promoting human rights and social progress?

Project Description: My project is a policy brief about the Malaria situation in Congo. It includes its nature and magnitude, the most affected populations, the socio-economic consequences, and the potential solution to reduce the burden. The policy aims to convince the finance Minister of Congo to invest in solutions for Malaria.

Project Reflection: “I enjoyed hearing from my peers how the health care systems function in different countries. A challenge was writing in the concise and precise way required for the policy brief.” -Sofia W.

Driving Question: How might I use photomontage as a tool to foster socio-politic reflection?

What was your initial idea and what did you want to do/learn with this project?

I like to know what’s happening around the different corners of the world. Thus I read and watch a lot of the news. Then I thought: why don’t I make something out of it? That’s how I started it. It’s an ongoing project, and I’m mostly developing my research and multicultural literacy skills. Also, I have been improving my photoshop skills a lot, but it’s not my main focus.

Did your project development and change from your initial idea, if so how?

Initially, I did not know the topics I would work on; I just figured it out as I researched through newspapers and magazines. I also visited museums and memorials around different countries in Europe, which worked as an inspiration for some of my montages, which will be available next term.

What are your big takeaway lessons from this project?

It’s possible to transform a cabbage into a flower: raw and boring news can become interactive and interesting art pieces.

Driving Question: How can I learn about physics through designing and creating a Rube Goldberg Machine?

What was your final product?

My final product was a functioning Rube Goldberg Machine. A RGM is a machine that preforms a function with many pointless steps to get to it. In my case, my function was to feed my dogs. 

What are you passionate about that led you to choose this project?

I chose to do this project because I wanted to learn about basic physics laws and how they relate to everyday actions.

What do you hope people will get from looking at your page?

I hope people will watch the video of my machine and try to think about what physics it took to make it happen.

Did your project develop and change from your initial idea, if so how?

Although I always knew I wanted to make an RBM, the process changed quite a few times. Originally I was going to make it be vertical on a board, but after hours of failed attempts to make anything stick to the board, I decided to make it on a table instead. 

What are your big takeaway lessons from this project?

My biggest takeaway from this project is probably patience. It was very frustrating when every time I tried to run it something different would go wrong. I really had to persevere to complete this project.

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 goal was to improve effective communication. We worked as a team, and we upheld our working team agreement, which was to be respectful and honest to all group members.

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

We learned the core concepts of the design thinking process and how to apply it to other areas of our lives. We learned efficiency and developed a specialist level of teaming and collaboration 21st-century skills.

Instagram Link: https://www.instagram.com/thiink.about.us/

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?

As a group, our main goal was to develop a summative product that tackled our chosen issue – the lack of youth involvement in politics. We believe that our Instagram page’s have been effective in doing that, as it’s a medium present in teenagers’ lives, so we can spread politics and share important things with them in an easier way. The other goal was to create a pleasant work environment, with an equilibrated and smart distribution of work. By scheduling weekly meetings and creating a full value agreement at the beginning of the module, we managed to count each other accountable and create a safe work environment in which everyone felt comfortable to contribute

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

We were able to learn the design thinking process through our module and later, apply it in our summative project. We searched through multiple creative ways to solve our problem but finally agreed on making an Instagram account with the independence of choosing a state of the world to focus on and post about. I personally learned that I can listen to my teammates and agree collectively on a subject. I have become more open to discussing others’ ideas and have a different mindset when approaching these projects.

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

We were able to learn the design-thinking process through our module and later, apply it in our summative project. We searched through multiple creative ways to solve our problem, but finally agreed on making an instagram account with the independence of choosing a state of the world to focus on and post about. I personally learned that I am able to listen to my teammates and agree collectively on a subject. I have become more open to discussing others ideas and have a different mindset when approaching these projects.

What did this project mean to you?

This project meant us learning about our generation and the issues we face and think of ways to make our generation aware the issues.

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 main goal for this module was to take the US ballot design issues and come up with a new ballot that the people understand. We went through many interviews with users to meet this goal and detected the main problems with the existing ballots. We found that generally, they were very confusing and out of order. We took the information we learned and implemented it into our design. To make sure that our design hit our goals, we got many rounds of feedback. In the end, the above design proved to be the most self-explanatory and neutral.

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

We learned tons about the US voting process, as well as how to lead effective interviews.

What did this project mean to you?

This project was very relevant to Hanna and interesting to Samy because of the US election happening this year and the scandals with voting fraud.

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

Explanation of Summative

Our summative product is the concept design and layout for an app designed to help households cut back on their domestic food waste by providing them with an interface to better manage the contents of their fridge, their dietary needs, and trips to the grocery store. The app would address some of the main reasons for domestic food waste that we identified – overbuying of food in general and poor storage of it in the house (i.e. forgetting about it in the fridge, letting it exceed its expiry date and having to throw it away, etc).

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

Our primary goal as a team was to learn how to collaborate effectively online, especially when deprived of the intimacy and information exchange of real human contact. Our meetings were casual yet productive, and we made the most of our situation by calling each other frequently in between to compensate for the lost opportunities we would have had if we were physically together. Another of our goals was to learn how to properly conduct interviews with users – we achieved this first by researching the nuances of good and bad interviews and then interviewing members of our families, the TGS community, etc.

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

A large part of our creative process had to do with accommodating various people in our team. This meant scheduling meetings, which included keeping in mind a distance of 7 hours between two of the members’ timezones. In another sense, though, this involved designating roles based on different people’s abilities and expertise, largely to do with technology and software design. Therefore, we learned the importance of using the strengths of the people on our team and assigning them to the areas that they’d be most effective in.

What did this project mean to you?

This project was meaningful in that it brought a group of us students together who didn’t necessarily interact very much outside of school before; it also taught our team much about the real nature of collaboration as something that can be both online and in person.

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.