Week 3: Research & Ideate –– Youth Design Academy 2, 2018 San Francisco, Middle School

This week at YDA2, we worked on ideation, thinking of different solutions that may work before narrowing down the final idea.

We started class off with wrapping up our portfolios from the previous class in the computer lab. After that we played a class favorite game, I am a tree. This is the same game which students played during our first class.

After reviewing the class rules we started our lesson, in connection to our previous class community challenge selection, financial literacy. We learned that through some research there are similar apps out there that help kids understand their finances. But wondered what are some of the challenges current middle schoolers face with their finances and how do we understand what our group needs.

We learned to ideate thought brainstorming, drilling down ideas about money further and further visually through a mind map with our groups first then as a class we merged the consistent ideas to create a master mind map.

After lunch we played Run for the Truth, then got back to work coming up with a story boards for one of our branches in our mind map. One group had purchasing a luxury item while the other group focused on withdrawing and opening up a credit card from a bank. This gave the students time to think about each step through out the process of handling money throught the end goal and get to draw them in storyboard format.

During the final 15 minutes of class we went back into the computer lab to complete our week 3 portfolios.

Next weeks class will cover prototyping and review!