YDA 1: 2019 East Bay — Week 1
Hello and welcome to the very first Youth Design Academy post-class summary! This will be the place to review what your kids were up to on Saturday during session and see how everything is progressing.
The teaching team was so excited to meet everyone and get things started after several weeks of preparation from us volunteers and all the ongoing hard work from the Inneract Project staff. We covered a lot of stuff this session in a short amount of time!
Meeting everyone through People Bingo:
We started off the session with an icebreaker game to get a little familiar with one another called People Bingo. The Bingo board contains squares of different statements that people may or may not identify with. If you can find someone in the room who does identify with that statement you can fill that square in, and the first person to fill 5 squares in a row wins.
Students, parents, teachers and the assistants all participated in this fun and nerve-releasing exercise.
Congratulations to Malichi for completing People Bingo first by engaging with enough people to fill out squares to complete a row!
Establishing a class foundation
Janina, then took the stage to explain to everyone what the difference between art and what design is. Prior to this teaching, what would you have thought the differences between them are?
Next, Janina walked us through design practices and what companies are well-known for their emphasis on good design and its impact on business and society. What companies do you think of when you think of good design?
Build a Tower
From there we moved into a team-based exercise called Build a Tower. This is a fun and challenging exercise that stresses teamwork and collaboration to problem solve. In this case, the problem is to build the tallest structure that holds a marshmallow on top using spaghetti, string, and tape to hold the marshmallow up. To make it even more exciting, the teams had to construct their towers in 20 minutes.
Once all the groups got their supplies to begin, the room first got louder as people started dialogues about what to do and then quieted down to focus on the task at hand. People were looking around to see what other teams were doing perhaps to help inspire ideas or get a comparison check with other teams on progress.
In the end, it came down to two teams whose structures were so close in height they needed to be measured next to each other.
What was unique about about the winning team’s approach when asked was that they described sketching ideas out before beginning to build anything.
The Community Challenge
The last item on the agenda was to kick-off the community challenge through brainstorming exercises led by Janina. Three key community focuses developed that we then broke down into specific challenges. From there, we voted on what challenge we wanted to make our focus for the entire duration of YDA-1.
The winning challenge the class wants to focus on, life skills courses within school, is a really exciting one that will challenge our students and will bring out so many great ideas that will lead to even better solutions.
What’s coming up:
Next week, we go forth with our community challenge to solve and focus on a key area of design — communicating through graphic design!
Thank you everyone who participated, it was such a pleasure to meet all of you and we are excited to get this year going with these wonderful and creative students!
