Blog Post for 12/13/17

Final Reflection

EVIDENCE OF LEARNING (include artifacts, photos, videos, drawings, sketches)

Today was one of the highlights of the entire intensive. I loved being able to share our project with the rest of the community. One conversation with Mr. Snyder was especially insightful. We discussed the different SEED blocks and their role in and out of the classroom. Today I was able to reflect on the entire course as a whole. This course has been a very powerful experience and has reshaped my mindset on numerous topics. What I appreciate the most about this course was the social interactions between myself, my peers, and my teachers.

Final Personal Blog Post

WHAT DID WE DO? WHAT'S NEW and CHANGED? (reflection and description of event / activity)

EVIDENCE OF LEARNING (include artifacts, photos, videos, drawings, sketches)

This final presentation went very well. We got a lot of good feedback. Mrs. Agar suggested we start with the next freshman class. I think that this a very good idea. She also suggest we do it on paper because it would take too long to make that many copies of wooden passports.  Mr. Looney and other visitors also liked our idea. Today's highlighted SEED term is social interactions because we had positive social interactions with the people who were on the gallery walk. The picture of the presentation is shown in the evidence of learning section.

Final Blog Post

Today was the last day of our intensive, we got lots of feedback from parents, peers, teachers, and students alike. a lot of the feedback we got was that we had an incredible idea and there wasn't a single person that said they didn't like it. My grandmother in fact helped us come up with a name for one of our passports 'levels', and i appreciate that even though she had only heard about my project for a short amount of time she was eager to jump in and find a way to help us out. i thought that showed our project created an initiative in people to jump in and start helping out. Mr. Looney told us that if this project went further than hawken it could really be something special, and that students could go around and just get stamps without creating actual relationships with their teachers, bringing up an idea to have teachers decide whether to stamp the passport or not. i thought today went great and we all did amazing things.

WHAT DID WE DO? WHAT'S NEW and CHANGED? (reflection and description of event / activity)

EVIDENCE OF LEARNING (include artifacts, photos, videos, drawings, sketches)

During our gallery walk this morning a lot of people seemed to have positive responses  to our idea. many people liked not only our final project but the question that our group worked to solve. People were concerned with the feasibility of building a wooden passport for every student. This is something we plan to solve with paper passports for now, and possibly moving to apps, and wearable tech rings. Mr. Looney presented the issue that students could just run around collecting stamps without actually building a relationship. We plan to counteract this with having the teacher be able to determine whether or not it was a "stamp worthy" conversation.

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WHAT DID WE DO? WHAT'S NEW and CHANGED? (reflection and description of event / activity)

EVIDENCE OF LEARNING (include artifacts, photos, videos, drawings, sketches)

Today our group shared our project with friends, teachers, acquaintances, parents, and also to Mr. Looney. We were given lots of great feedback and criticism from most people who visited our section. We were helped by Jackson's grandmother who helped us come up with names for the levels. We were talked to by Mrs. Agar, who wanted to incorporate our project into Hawken next year. The feedback we received was very informative and helpfull, and we will work on incorporating these into our project.

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WHAT DID WE DO? WHAT'S NEW and CHANGED? (reflection and description of event / activity) Today our group worked fairly well together during our final work day. We completed the rest of our project, and we displayed them in the room. During this intensive, i learned a lot of new skills and techniques. We learned a lot of techniques such as the 2 min strong pose. We also learned about the importance of play, group work, and collaboration. These play a huge role in brainstorming and generating ideas. I also had many great experiences in Boston that have had a big impact on me. I made countless memories such as going to the state house.  We were able to present our projects and attend Harvard classes. We were given the opportunity to visit MIT and see all of their cool projects like there media lab. I also learned a lot about myself during this intensive. I never realized how much i liked working in the fab lab, or working in project groups such as these.

WHAT DID WE DO? WHAT'S NEW and CHANGED? (reflection and description of event / activity)

EVIDENCE OF LEARNING (include artifacts, photos, videos, drawings, sketches)

Today we had a very productive day, finishing our passport book, our power point, and our stamps. We are very close to finishing our poster board and the SEED block lamp.   Our group decided on splitting up so none of us would stand around doing nothing. For the passport map, I finished making the design on ink space, and Jackson and I worked on laser cutting them out. Liam and I worked and finished the power point today. Joe is mainly working on the SEED block lamp. During our brainstorming sessions, he directs us in a direction where we can think of ideas. Today Hunter finished making the stamps. He created 4 stamps, one for math, science, humanities, and art. Hunter and Jackson's main focus today was in the fab lab. They made a lot of important objects we need for our presentation and project. Even though our group split up today during class time, we still collaborated our ideas. Before we made any drastic changes, we asked the rest of our group first. Good Job today guys! We have a lot of work tomorrow, but i think we are in a good place.

December 12th Blog Post

WHAT DID WE DO? WHAT'S NEW and CHANGED? (reflection and description of event / activity)

EVIDENCE OF LEARNING (include artifacts, photos, videos, drawings, sketches)

Today, our group started designing our final project. Joe and Jackson worked on creating SEED blocks in the fabrication lab and spray painting them. The SEED blocks will serve as a holder for the passports as well as a lamp. We decided to make the SEED blocks the passport holders because without social interactions, experiences, a positive environment and discoveries, this idea would not have been created. Pictures of the SEED blocks are shown in the Evidence of Learning section. Hunter worked on designing the department stamps (administration, arts, humanities, mathematics and science) in the fabrication lab. The stamps will be used by teachers to stamp student's passports after meeting with them.  Each department has a different stamp with a logo that represents their department in some way. For example, the arts logo has a paintbrush. We currently have prototypes of the stamps and they look very good. Nathan primarily worked on the design for the maps of the levels. They are looking very nice and will soon be completed. Nathan also collaborated with me on creating a presentation that will be shown during Friday's gallery walk. Today, one of things that I did while working on the presentation was write out a list of all of our failed ideas. I was shocked to find that we had changed our idea over 28 times. It was really interesting looking at how our idea evolved. This slide can be seen in the evidence of learning section. I am very happy with our group's progress for the day. I believe it was one of our most productive days and we are on track for an amazing final product. The part of SEED that was most impactful today was environment. Without Hawken's fabrication lab, we would have been unable to design the SEED blocks and the stamps.

WHAT DID WE DO? WHAT'S NEW and CHANGED? (reflection and description of event / activity)

EVIDENCE OF LEARNING (include artifacts, photos, videos, drawings, sketches)

12/5/17 Missed Blog Post Today we spent our day in Boston at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. This was a great experience because we were able to meet with Sherry Lassiter, who we were told is the sort of "Henry Ford of Fab Labs". Mrs. Lassiter gave us great insights into the the Fab Labs of MIT by running down the equipment, their uses, and the innovations they provide. Our conversation with Grace Copplestone was helpful as well since it gave us a view into MIT as a school, what they do, and how the go about doing it. Finally, our trips to the biomechatronics and tangible media labs. These labs where amazingly impressive and gave us hands on experiences with the projects created by MIT students. Tangible Media in particular was amazing in all of the projects that the showed we were allowed to play with and learn about them through play. As this is being written a week after it was supposed to, I can not remember for certain what iterations we made on this day, however I do know that this was an important day for not even just our group, but the intensive as a whole. The hands on learning was a great way to improve our knowledge of the creative process and advance our projects in a single day.

WHAT DID WE DO? WHAT'S NEW and CHANGED? (reflection and description of event / activity)

EVIDENCE OF LEARNING (include artifacts, photos, videos, drawings, sketches)

Today our group mostly focused on creating physical artifacts in order to have a physical representation of the progress we have made. We came up with an idea for a container of the initial passports that would be handed out to the school. The containers would be four boxes, each with their own letters: S, E, E, D. the four boxes would be stacked on top of each other with a wire running through each of them to power a light bulb at the top of the structure, similar to a lamp. We thought of this idea as metaphorical of how each of the steps of S.E.E.D. contribute to creating ideas, brilliance, progress, etc. we cut out three of the four cardboard models of these in the Fab Lab.  another aspect of our project we worked on outside of this was a physical model of what the inside of our 'passport' books would look like. Our ideas of where we want to take the game and what we have already developed thus far led us to adding a little higher quality to our idea.  we worked on creating themes for each of the 'levels' of our passport; each level having something to do with how good the bond between the student and their teachers are. Our first solid idea of a theme was a winter based one with the 'ranking' being "Ice Breaker", in my opinion a super clever name. we ran into a roadblock along that path though, we couldnt really figure out other names of that caliber to associate the other levels of bonds students can have with their teachers. the closest we got to "Ice Breaker" was "Bond Maker". afterwards we talked to Mr. Greenfield about our research and he pointed us towards JSTOR to look for credible and useful resources on game theory to fuel our knowledgeably of our own topic.

(we really didnt take any pictures of our work today and for the time being this will have to be left blank, we will upload pictures of our work first thing in the morning)

WHAT DID WE DO? WHAT'S NEW and CHANGED? (reflection and description of event / activity)

EVIDENCE OF LEARNING (include artifacts, photos, videos, drawings, sketches)

Today was a revolutionary day for our group in that we completely changed our project the day before our final Harvard presentation. We have decided to move away from the idea of using rings, to creating a cross between and a passport and a Mario/board game. The new game will utilize a game board and stamps in order to encourage students to meet with teachers outside of class. We developed this idea early today in a group meeting, and we were able to flesh it out more as the day progressed and we went about our scavenger hunt. While it was something that needed to be done, the ring was hard to let go of, due to how hard we had worked on it as a group. Another difficult piece to let go of was any sort of incentive as a our teachers constantly told us, an incentive is counterproductive to our point.

WHAT DID WE DO? WHAT'S NEW and CHANGED? (reflection and description of event / activity)

EVIDENCE OF LEARNING (include artifacts, photos, videos, drawings, sketches)

Today our group learned a lot during our time at Harvard, Nuvu, and at the Artisans Asylum. We started the day at Harvard learning about how different Harvard professors/ students viewed creativity. We learned about Qualitative and Quantitative reasoning, framing and  re-framing creativity, and participatory creativity. Listening to the Harvard researchers, we talked a lot about the  many steps it takes to come up with a creative idea. While at Nuvu, we were inspired by the other students projects and insights on our ideas. We were previously having trouble creating a reward system, but the Nuvu students inspired us. They inspired us with their outside and unbiased opinions. Their comments and criticism made us take a step back in our project, Keys to Success. Yesterday in our group check in with the teachers, we were told to take a step back and look at our project in a broader view. Through all the experiences at Harvard, Nuvu, and the Artisans Asylum, we were able to take the step back.