Introducing Digital Design 2! The Class I've Always Wanted to Teach, but needed to come into existence. The series of Digital Design 1 and 2 is meant for our 9th and 10th grade students here at Convent & Stuart Hall in SF.
One of our goals is students as producers of meaningful work as opposed to memorizing and regurgitating content. This is a push for teachers to engage students in meaningful, higher-order thinking and engage each student by connecting their interests and the world outside the classroom to the content of the class. Education is NOT moving away from memorization and lower level thinking as quickly as we should for a variety of reasons. Resistance to making this paradigm shift is a result of the challenge of developing classes that are cross curricular & prepare students for roles they would actually have in the professional world. Teachers have a lot on their plate and those who excel oftentimes receive more on their plate as opposed to continuing to develop new approaches to steep education in application. This Digital Design class is an integration of all things STEAM with a focus on design. Science is art is science. Math and technology are tools used for science and engineering is the application of science. These are intrinsically tied together and should be in our curriculum as a result.
So why is it that we have compartmenatlized these subjects? Why aren't enough teachers making connections? Are we simply delivering the education as it was given to us by default? Living in our departmentalized and compartmentalized world oftentimes limits our vision and idea of what our class should be. So how do we create classes in which students actually apply skills from the various subject areas to a relevant and interesting hands-on project...
Well, EMBRACE THE CHAOS is step 1. New projects and collaborations can be challenging and will always result in on-the-spot troubleshooting as well as things not going as planned. Knowing this going in helps me in taking these risks. I think this undefined and less predictable part is what holds back many teachers back. They want everything to be super planned and go just as planned. This isn't the experience students have outside the classroom. We are not pushing ourselves as developers of curriculum and we are not pushing our students.
Students should experience failure as they learn because this will be their experience in life. Navigating the emotions, self-discipline and reflection that goes along with this is key for them to being successful as adults. Students should fail and deal with this on a number of levels. If we skate through school without failure we end up lost in the job world in which success does not mimic the academic success we may have experienced.
With these goals in mind and a desire to go from imagination to creation with a variety of modern tools, Digital Design is born. Here's how I'm currently framing the series of 2 semester-long courses.
Digital Design 1 is an intro to software and hardware used to 3D print and laser cut. We are largely using Tinkercad as it is functional with both machines with some Adobe Illustrator which students can use for the lasercutter. Tinkercad can also be used for virtual Arduino work down the line in DD2. There are some other programs that would be great to incorporate into 3D printing, but it is just a semester-long class so I don't want to spend excessive time learning how to use more software. I want students to move from mimicking "how to" videos & lessons towards developing unique designs and approaches to using these tools.
The goal of the new Digital Design 2 class is to build on the tools used in DD1 in order to make interactive pieces that are both artistic and functional with Arduino and Raspberry Pi. LEDs, cameras, motors, sensors galore... An exciting introduction to basic coding through physical computing on fun projects that always involve students making choices based on their interests. This is quarter 1 of the new class and so far groups have designed 3D printed wrenches to fit 3D printed nuts and bolts of various sizes pictured at the top. We also just started Arduino CTC 101 which is exciting, but is taking some figuring out. As always each students shares her/his work on a weekly blog (the collection can be found here) including pics, video of the design process (sped up), a description of something they're proud of from the week, a description of a challenge they faced and a sentence describing their plans. More to come...
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