Often in school, success is measured narrowly around whether students pass a set of tests and exams. And for many students, who spend hours each week studying and pouring notes, they have learned that failure is not an option.
But at Gray Stone Day School in Jeff Brown’s Design Lab class, located in a spacious classroom known as the Innovation Lab, failure is not only expected, it is encouraged as part of the learning process. For the past two months, Brown’s students have been working in pairs to design and engineer hands-on projects.
Whether you’re building life-size robots and catapults, designing animated videos, erecting self-supporting arch bridges or producing natural pigments, students have learned how to adapt, realizing that if the first plan doesn’t work, that’s okay, as long as they continue to solve their problems to find a solution. better.
“They picked the idea, but then they have to do the whole design from scratch, define everything, and then build it,” Brown said.
While projects and curricula are technically STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) in nature, Brown uses the term Design Lab to describe his classes because he wants students to be creative and imaginative when building their projects.
“My goal in this class has always been for them to learn how to think,” said Brown, who was a chemical engineer before becoming a teacher. “I’m really trying to teach them to be creative in solving problems.”
In its chapters, failure is not fatal; Instead, it is often the starting point that leads students to stop, reassess, and think differently toward overcoming problems. Much of the learning is done by simple trial and error.
Although Brown is their advisor, the students are responsible for all aspects of the projects and for overcoming any problems that may arise.
“I give them a lot of freedom,” he said. “I’m really just their mentor and coach because I want them to struggle and figure it out and come out the other side.”
Seniors Simon Butler and Stephanie Varbanoff created a replica of the Da Vinci Bridge, an ancient design devised by Leonardo da Vinci, without using any fasteners or any other modern technology. Every part of the process, from retrieving the wood to cutting it by hand into smaller pieces and assembling the structure, was completed by the students.
Each project must meet specific requirements. For a Butler and Varbanov bridge, it must be at least two feet long, span at least three feet and support the weight of a person standing on it.
“No matter how much research we did or how much drawing or sketches we did, nothing ever happened the way we planned,” Varbanov said.
Simon Butler and Stephanie Varbanoff, two seniors at Gray Stone, have spent the past two months building the Da Vinci Bridge.
Juniors Sama Hoare and Shawn Devlin have built a robotic winch capable of lifting a two-pound object, in this case, a water bottle, and moving it at least 24 inches. They used a series of connected hydraulic syringes filled with water to operate the machine.
“I learned a lot about engineering and teamwork, because we have been working together for about two months,” Houari said.
Not all projects involve building a physical structure. For the rookies, Cindy Chen and Lucy Hathcock, most of their work was done on the computer. They create an animated video using old school techniques like stop motion technology. The video must contain a plot of land, be at least four minutes in length, and consist of at least 1,000 frames.
“We have to take screenshots of each frame and put them together into a video and have audio, dialogue and voice overs,” Chen said, noting that each frame was originally drawn manually.
Juniors Cindy Chen and Lucy Hathcock are working on their own animated video.