While the students hit the road to experience the City Museum in St. Louis, I’ll summarize where the project stands with a little under 2 weeks to remaining.
Last week the group gave their mid-way presentation to first the other DFA groups and coaches and then to the Chicago Children’s Museum. I was thrilled with their opening concept that there are two main aspects to design and consider: the human experience and the physical environment. A humanistic approach to architecture!
A very introspective and cerebral group, the bulk of their presentation listed what they’ve learned about the tinkering approach to learning and current trends in learning in general. They then explained three potential themes for their project: the home, steam punk, and Rube Goldberg contraptions (interesting to see they have a bias towards analog and retro concepts). The presentation challenged the students to synthesize and condense their iterative and non-linear experience into a linear story.
To help them identify a possible organization, I asked them, what is your fundamental framework? Their explanation of the tinkering process seemed to be the natural answer. And so their following question was, how did we decide on this? Where did our observations and take-aways from conversations with CCM staff play into that framework? An excellent, reflective question that is often hard to answer by retracing steps that involve subconscious synapse connections. We decided as a group that the tinkering process is the fundamental goal of the exhibit, that their secondary research and conversations on exhibit design and learning shaped this understanding, and that their observations of and interviews with kids inform best practices for facilitating this process. Those observations and interviews can serve as the starting points for further brainstorming.
Interestingly, the CCM staff weren’t crazy about their themes and urged them to use tinkering as the overall theme. This caused us to reflect: is tinkering an overall theme or a process that can be applied to anything? To emphasize an approach to learning that acknowledges that everyone will engage in a process differently, I feel that there should be a captivating and enticing overall theme to draw kids in and then the exhibit facilitates a tinkering process amongst that theme. We’ll see what the students decide is the best course and what they feel they can accomplish.
Next steps seem to be to commit to a concept: a theme and maybe one or two exemplary activities within that theme. Should the students commit to a concept they’ve outlined in the mid-way presentation or continue brainstorming? Overall, the group does more deep thinking that brainstorming and my fellow coach and I would like to see them resist this preference and explore the other half of the brain. When is it time to turn off the brain and unleash the imagination? Do some do this easier than others?
And as the end of the program will come all too soon, we want to decide on: what does success look like? Is it a beautiful design concept or a specific behavior that results from the space? Or both?
-Sarah Malin