Take Care, Be Well (Student Guide)

How might we ensure health and safety for people in our community?

This challenge draws from Sustainable Development Goal 3, which seeks to ensure healthy lives and promote well-being for all at all ages.

Prepare: Learn about the key ideas in this project

Health and safety intersects with every aspect of our lives. Ensuring our health and safety is not only dependent on our behaviors, but the environments, structures, and systems in which we live.

Start the challenge by considering the questions below:

• What does it mean to be healthy?
• What does it mean to be safe?
• What types of behaviors or environments promote health and safety?
• What might prevent someone from being healthy or safe?
• How might health and safety relate to any of the other Sustainable Development Goals?

The goal of this challenge is to create something that helps ensure the health and safety of people in your community. You may create anything from a campaign, to a product or device, a local system, and much more.

As you explore this challenge, consider how health and safety relates to other topics and issues that interest you. For example, how might health and safety relate to your favorite sports and recreational activities? How might health and safety relate to the natural or physical environment where you live? How might health and safety relate to the foods and snacks you enjoy?

Take inspiration from a few student projects that demonstrate how health and safety may relate to other topics you care about:

• In California, USA, a student produced a 360° film to bring attention to poor access of nutritious food in his community.
• In Mississauga, Canada, students created a campaign to spark dialogue between students, teachers, and parents about mental health at their school.
• Students in Vermont, USA designed a special mitten for the homeless population in their city.
• In Pennsylvania, USA, students created a pill lockbox to ensure that medications are securely stored at home.

Practice: Try as many activities to as you would like to build your skills

Practice a Thinking Routine
Where might there be opportunities to design something that contributes to the health and safety of people in your community? Get into the designer’s mindset by practicing the thinking routines Parts, Purposes, Complexities and Parts, People, Interactions. You may also take inspiration from the questions in the Imagine If thinking routine to consider how objects, systems, and interactions in your community could be improved to promote health and safety.

Practice Needfinding
Talk to people in your community to learn more about their needs and challenges. Use the project What Makes You Happy? to practice your interviewing skills.

You can also collect data to gain insight on the needs, challenges, and opportunities in your community. If you don’t know where to start, try Deliberating Data to consider how to make meaning of the data available to you. Then try Data Hunting to start collecting your own data or researching data collected by others.

Define the Need
What need or problem will your project address? Define it in a few sentences and create a Problem Tree to explore the causes and effects involved.

Build Skills
What will you create to ensure health and safety in your community? You can create anything from a campaign, to a product or device, a system, and much more. Whatever you decide to create, you will need to build skills to bring your idea to life. Below are few of many possibilities:

• If you would like to (re)design a product or device, consider creating a digital prototype in TinkerCad. If you are new to Tinkercad, learn the basics with the Cookie Cutter project. You may also try the Upcycle It project to create something new with the resources already available to you.
• If you would like to create media, an initiative, or a campaign for your project, practice storytelling with the project Moving Pictures. Try telling your story through a different medium with Give it a Shot or The Sound of Story.
• If you would like to visualize data in your project, try the One Thousand Words project.
• If you would like to create a simulation for your project, get started with the basics of simulation with Make it Digital! To make your simulation interactive, try the Interactive Imagination project.
• If you would like to (re)design a physical environment for your project, practice with Redesign a Common Space.

These are just a few suggestions among endless possibilities. Brainstorm what your project could be and gather the necessary resources to help you complete it.

Produce: Dig into the project and make it your own!

How might we ensure health and safety for people in our community?

The goal of this challenge is to create something that helps ensure the health and safety of people in your community. You may create anything from a campaign, to a product or device, a system, and much more.

Produced by Digital Promise Global, with thanks to the Open Educational Resources listed throughout this guide. Distributed to Learning Studios schools as part of HP, Inc. and Microsoft’s Reinvent the Classroom.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. You may share this project or modified versions of it under this same license.