The next generation should be equipped with the skills they need to do well for themselves and to do good for their communities and the world we live in. Through practicing computational and design thinking, students will acquire skills for building, inventing, and sharing innovative products and systems that serve their local and global communities.
Read more below about social innovation in the Learning Studio.
“Our students chose two goals to focus on: quality education and no hunger. I’m working on this with our Library Club, so the idea is to build a Little Free Library combined with a Little Free Food Pantry. The students chose their project teams to plan and prototype: Book Drive Team, Food Drive Team, Marketing Team, Design Team, and Research Team. We have a 3D model of the Little Free Library/Pantry made on Tinkercad and have 3D printed the prototype. The students are working on a cardboard prototype to scale before we construct the actual Little Free Library/Pantry. We will also have some flyers for our book/food drives featuring facts on world, United States, South Carolina, and Greenville area literacy and poverty/hunger/food insecurity, and possibly also a video. We’ve reached out to Read Greenville, a division of Greenville First Steps, a non-profit that supports literacy in our community, to work on the location for our Little Free Library/Pantry. A representative from their organization will be at our ‘grand opening’ and I’m also inviting members of the Greer Chamber of Commerce.” – Gaelyn Jenkins, Riverside Middle School in Greer, South Carolina. Watch their story.
“As part of students’ curriculum, they need to develop a business in which they design a solution to a problem they see in the community. One student was touched by a lady in his church who felt ostracized because she had a prosthetic hand. As he thought about her story, he thought about how much worse it would be for children. So his idea is to develop custom prosthetics for children, which can be built and modified by the child. He and his team partner are currently on the third prototype for their idea. His team partner is also developing wireframes for an interactive website for children and their parents. They have been in touch with Phoenix Children’s Hospital and with prosthetics manufacturers to gather interest in the idea.” – Darrell Kidd, MET Professional Academy in Peoria, Arizona. Read more.
Reinvent the Classroom