Design is a universal process.

The thirty two freshmen in our current rotation are having a blast making race-capable cars with the tools in our makerspace. 

My awesome colleague, Michael and I were inspired by the Pinewood derby cars of Cub Scout fame. (Me, salty that Girl Scouts never did that until recently, and him, aglow with fond memories of racing them as a boy and subsequently with his son). 

Freshmen were divided into groups of 3-4. We came up with some basic height, weight and wheel requirements so that the students could race down the same track. All cars have to incorporate: 3D printed wheels, lasercut chassis, and optionally can be painted in the team theme (lots of kids are designing ‘Pit Crew’ t-shirts with the sublimation printer and vinyl cutter). 

It is all still early to mid-process, with test runs beginning late next week as we finish the first cars and the track. 

Current key questions we are working through: 

How do we prevent machine bottleneck as everyone nears fabrication? 

Will basic nails work as axles? 

Are the 3D wheels perfect enough to ‘roll successfully’? 

I have some photos below of early prototypes and sketches. We’ll be racing them in March! 

Our school recently finished construction of our new Makerspace, and there has been a lot of discourse this year about best practices for implementation throughout our curriculum. 

As the point person for our Freshmen Design Module and a design thinking teacher, I’ve been enjoying brainstorming ways to teach the new tools (vinyl cutter, laser cutter, 3D printers, etc) holistically rather than a-la-carte. Students using two or three of these machines per project are forced to reiterate and adjust their design a little more to fit with wider constraints. 

 I’m playing around with the best way to introduce my classes to a project lifecycle from the get-go (rather than just a piecemeal tools class), and combinatory prompts are yielding some exciting results. The goal is for refinement to happen naturally as the project develops, rather than me, the teacher, prompting them to adjust as they finish development each time. We’re still in the beginning of the process, but it is so great to see the kids jazzed about learning Inkscape and having to ‘tweak’ designs as they realize they need to.

Here are photos of my Functional Design class (mixed grades and experience levels) working on prototypes of boardgames they’ve modified, using at least two of the machines in the basement. Not pictured is the lasercut checkers board or the poster-sized custom school Monopoly design.

There’s a lot of benefit to giving your students a ‘real-world’ group  film experience along with the solo work. I go back and forth between the benefits of both scenarios- one can suffer the usual pitfalls of a group endeavor, but the other prevents students from seeing the real project management aspect of filmmaking. It’s something I’ve been playing with this semester in the form of 2 group projects. We had a major collaboration with the Theater 1 class to drive home what the ‘pipeline’ looks like and give kids actual directing advice (something I’m lacking coaching experience in, considering I deal mostly in non-fiction work on my own, or animation.) It was a great exercise and we produced a homecoming video screened to the whole school. (working in real-world deadlines was a great motivator.)

Learning through observation and imitation is a great way to develop your own sensibilities. Two things happened to me yesterday: my friend got hit in the face with a baseball (send him your good energy!) and I heard about the ending run of Lucky Peach, one of my favorite magazines. This is the get-well card I made for my friend, he’s an avid David Chang fan like me. I used photos from my friend’s baking Instagram to personalize further....and added some equations to the background because, well, he’s a math teacher!

Lucky Peach’s aesthetic is pretty eclectic (and I’m in LOVE with it); it was fairly straightforward to design and make this. Hard to go wrong! 

TL;DR, just watch this

....something I realized a little too late into the game my first year of teaching was that smartphones and Google Drive have totally changed the way adolescents understand managing their computers. 

What comes second nature to me (and blind-sided me in class) because I toted USBs in secondary school is just not a Thing anymore. Kids keep their files in the cloud! Pictures, documents, it’s all on Google Drive or Photos. You don’t have to care about knowing where you put something, because it’s searchable immediately. We don’t use USB sticks or flash drives, everything is in the ether and portable all on its own. No exoskeletons needed. 

This is fine for most standard classes, and even most Photoshop projects, but when it comes to film, lack of good file storage flat out kills projects. Modern video software still requires the user to keep their files on the local harddrive in a consistent location. Why? Because raw movie files are huge and playback/editing would take twice as long if the computer needed to pull from farther away! USB and Cloud Downloads for most people are still really, really slow. 

Final Cut Pro X and iMovie both sort your files for you. When importing a movie, it has you title the project and squirrels away your footage into its own directory, freeing the user from any headaches. This causes some stress down the line if you ever want to work on the same project from a different computer. They can be so hard to find. Final Cut works around this with a ‘packaging’ button that will regroup everything for you should you need it.

Adobe Premiere lets you set your own directory locations, but therein lies the hangup for my students. They just don’t understand that files need to be in the same place as the .pproj file they are saving and creating. With all of the other programs they use (Photoshop, iMovie, Final Cut X) the data has always been self-contained. If you send a file, for the most part, it is viewable on whatever it’s being sent to. (modern versions of iMovie and Final Cut both lack an ‘export’ button, it’s a ‘share’ button, so they even have trouble grasping that the file has to be cooked together before it’s viewable on grandma’s VCR or whatever.) They live a drag-and-drop lifestyle and can be sloppy about where the stuff is in the computer. It’s never had to be in one place before. 

Unfortunately, if it wasn’t in one place, other kids using the computers could inadvertently move stuff or delete everything from downloads, etc....so many projects had met their maker before completion in my lab. Worse, frequently they would email me the .pproj file as a final project submission, not getting that I couldn’t watch it without all the supporting footage in the same folder! Kids Do Not Get the sanctity of keeping digital stuff in one consistent place. Because it’s not tangible! If it were a physical filing cabinet they would do so much better. 

This is the first project I have my students in Meaning & Media make, in order to get the hang of Adobe Photoshop.

Skill Level: High School, mixed class, 12 students total, class meets 3-4 times a week in 50 minute blocks. Usually takes 2-3 weeks to complete.

Object: Make a 24” diameter symmetrical image that expresses aspects of your personality! Encourage students to use their own photos, but pulling from Google Images is also a great option.

Skills Learned:

General Navigation tools

saving and backing up to Google Drive

scaling images

Cutting and Pasting

duplication

Cropping backgrounds out of images

Understanding Adobe’s Layers and organization

What works really well here are the image duplications. Once students get the hang of things, iteration becomes rapid, and they end up proceeding quickly, which makes them feel more confident in the software. I also like that they are limited in what they are doing- students are cutting, pasting, and scaling rather than drawing from scratch, which caps how many of the tools they need to be exposed to initially. It’s also great because the project is pretty democratic - I’ve had a pretty high ‘success’ rate, even if all the students are new to fine arts classes. (Meaning & Media is a gateway class at our school- we get a lot of students who don’t consider themselves ‘artists’ and are there for the required credit. Usually this class convinces them to stick around!) The symmetrical limitation on the project usually reaps well structured compositions. 

My method to teaching Photoshop is to talk about the general navigation and the pasting/cutting process with it open on a projector screen at the front of the room. Then, I have them find a few images initially and share them with the class, and ultimately let ‘em loose. It’s very bird-pushing-chicks-out-of-nest. The first three days they are frustrated, but that drops off quickly over time. I find that each student self-selects certain tools based on their unique needs, and it’s easier for me to help them one-on-one on a real project rather than lecture for 45 minutes about buttons in a testing or follow-along scenario. The kids hate that. They remember more by testing and trial and error. 

Reflecting, I’ve learned that success lies in the scale and enumeration of objects. You can see some student examples below! I print these and hang them up poster-sized around the school. Sometimes the kids will come up with variation ideas, which I love to encourage! The ombre one below was a particular standout! 

This weekend I had the privilege of going to the OESIS Boston conference in Quincy, MA. It was a room full of administrators, heads of school, and assorted tech teachers discussing Design Thinking, Engineering, 3D Printing, Innovation centers, and new forms of collaboration through technology. 

A page of my notes are above. I was the youngest attendee at this conference by far, and one of probably at most 2 other fine arts teachers. 

The biggest takeaway was that there are lots of new ways younger teachers and innovators are trying to harness technology in their own classes. Blended learning, teaching twitter, tying in Scratch programming with a creative writing experience. You name it, there was someone trying it, but there was a stark contrast between the early-adopters, a (as Seth Godin would call them, sneezers) and hesitant older faculty and administrators who were worried about a deterioration of faculty and school culture around these new processes. 

All the data points to a fundamental shift in the ways learning and success occur. I want to bring back the renaissance model. Let’s re-emphasize liberal arts and walk a few feet away from STEM and industrialized learning. Connecting information is more important than mindlessly consuming it, and when you compartmentalize the subjects, you prevent meaningful digestion of their importance. It’s impossible to adopt this at the secondary school level, because college admissions are keeping most elite prep schools in a vice grip. The future of school isn’t in purely academic learning (I plan on writing about why soon). The academic success of the future will be reliant on a more vocation-oriented model to survive. 

Connection over content! 

It’s amazing how much better my user experience has been since switching back to Apple (I went from an iPhone 4 to two iterations of the HTC One, and now the 6S.) Camera power has been the true motivator for the past 3 phones- but I’m starting to realize that I was paying a heavy price for lense clarity. My HTC glitched constantly- crucial apps quitting unexpectedly, files freezing, the keyboard haptics a constant source of frustration. It needed charging twice a day. Sometimes friends wouldn’t receive any notification of my calls or texts. There was something deeply, deeply wrong with that phone. By the end, I had to manually log all of my contacts into my new iPhone, because I got several SIM errors trying to export or transfer the list.

These designs are simple, they get the job done, and they are exactly what you’d want to showcase 40 years of technological progress against. No fuss, no muss.

1. Anticipation and forward thinking

2. Accommodation and flexibility