YDA 1:2019 South San Francisco — Week 1
For the South San Francisco team, the first day of class began with trying to get the students and ourselves to wake up and shake off the slumber that might have wanted to keep us in bed on a weekend. This can certainly prove difficult for middle school students and adults alike on a Saturday morning. However, once we warmed up to the idea of a literal awakening, we quickly saw a figurative awakening happening as well. As a teaching team, we’ve decided to share each of our moments that sparked joy in the classroom this week and that same theme arose: awakenings. We watched students walk in a bit sluggish & lazy and then we saw their faces began to light up as they had their respective “aha!” moments.
We decided to dive right into an exercise we called Introduce Yourself by Design. In groups of 3, the students introduced themselves and shared some details about who they are, what they like and what they’re good at in an effort to find common ground. The students then created a group logo to represent what their group was about. The brief asked that each logo include at least one of the following: brandmark, wordmark, lettermark or tagline. We saw the students really break the ice and show selfless leadership and collaboration to produce some great logos that provided an introduction beyond the simple name tag. We’ll now digitize the student logos to present in the Week 2 class as a lead-in to the topic Communication Design.
Our exercise for the second half of class was more of an active collaboration effort. Each group was tasked with building the tallest tower in the class in 20 minutes or less using only dried spaghetti, masking tape, and string. In the end, the tower had to be a freestanding structure stable enough to hold a marshmallow on top. In addition to the teaching team, the parents also got involved as consultants on this small scale engineering feat. It was exciting to see that each team devised their own unique approaches to complete the task, including building the tower upside down to start (which turned out to be the tallest tower at 19” tall)
The final activity was to brainstorm ideas for the Community Challenge. It was truly inspiring to see the range and depth of ideas presented by the students from using design as a tool to fight everything from bullying to racism to addiction to tech. They showed us they are 1. not oblivious to the problems that exist in their community and 2. are ready to tackle these problems head-on using design as a tool.
