sketches. Students offered poems, drawings, photographs, game ideas, schoolwork, and more. Sketchbook sharing became a platform for creative expression and personal reflection, which we suspect that students may have lacked in their other classes.

During each class, we encouraged our students to sketch, to collaborate on ideas, to be curious, and to not fear failure. Students were rewarded with buttons each time they demonstrated one of the habits. Since design principles and methods often seem abstract, we reinforced lessons with a physical representation of the things they learned. The buttons were the perfect reward for high school students, who proudly displayed them on their bookbags and clothing.

we discovered that their idea of community was much smaller than we had anticipated. They had trouble relating to the big city since, as teens, they didn’t feel any ownership of the city.

In response to their needs, we shifted the focus of our second-year program to a hyperlocal community project. Students worked with their school’s after-school nonprofit to design a website, all while employing principles of interaction design and the “habits of good designers” in their work.

Adding a service-oriented curriculum was a success. From the first class, students were engaged and invested in the class’s outcome, as it was so closely related to their experiences as students.

Successes and Failures

We approached each class as a prototype, with the expectation that we could iterate on our curriculum over time as the students interacted with our plans.

Our curriculum was most successful when our students were allowed and encouraged to demonstrate their creative ideas through sketchbooks, rapid brainstorming, and even group work, where they could showcase their best strengths and abilities.

When we created our curriculum, we thought the students would find it easy to connect to their broader New York City community. After a few weeks in class,

A Framework for Learning As our classes progressed, we began to formulate a framework for how students acquire complexity in thought and abilities by learning interaction design. We imagined the learning process as a progressive cycle focused around risk taking as a form of learning. A student is exposed to something new each time she takes a risk through hands-on design activities and projects. Everything she learns from this new experience is reinforced through self-reflection and awareness as concepts are absorbed. At the end of the cycle, the student is able to demonstrate what she’s learned. The teacher’s role is to challenge the student

Week 1: What Is Design? What is interaction? Our first class centered around defining the concepts of design and interaction. From iPods to MetroCards, we discussed how design affects everything we touch and experience every day. We were pleasantly surprised to discover that the girls had a pretty good understanding of the idea of interaction. They could name all of the feedback mechanisms on an NYC MTA turnstile and quickly grasped the action-reaction feedback loop.

Week 2: Brainstorming and Sketching Looking for a fun way to brainstorm, we decided to adapt a game called Graphic Jam from the book Gamestorming: A Playbook for Innovators, Rulebreakers, and Changemakers by Dave Gray, Sunni Brown, and James Macanufo. The game challenges participants to visualize words that often seem too abstract to imagine in a tangible way. Participants have two minutes to sketch as many ideas as they can to represent the chosen word.

Week 3: Field Research The focus of week 3 was observation. We wanted to teach our students the difference between their memory of a place and how it actually exists. We started a conversation about the street outside the school, asking them what kinds of things they see there each day. They shouted out the answers we expected: “Trees! Buildings! Crazy people!” We led them downstairs to the street, armed with a set of open-ended questions to guide their observations.

Week 4: Field Trip! We left the classroom and entered the design studio. Thirteen students from Project: Interaction visited R/GA to learn about what it is like to work on design projects outside of school. We heard from five amazing and inspiring women interaction designers, copywriters, and visual designers.

Week 5: Mobile Technology How would you have learned about the delicate art of egg boiling in 1990? Called your mom? Looked in a cookbook? (Gasp!) And what about 20 years from now? How will our ability to find information change in just two decades? This week was about the impact of mobile technology on the ways we find people and information. Students acted out a series of scenarios in each of three different technological points in history: 1990, 2010, and 2030.

Week 6: Solving Big Problems By week 6, we focused on future thinking and the dissection of big ideas. We wanted to encourage the students to think bigger than themselves and address tough problems that at first appear too big to solve. We took on transportation, challenging the girls to create solutions to tackle boredom while waiting for a bus or train.

Week 7: Interviewing and Storytelling During the beginning weeks of Project: Interaction, we experimented with ways for the girls to get to know one another. Since we had a mix of ninth and tenth graders, it was likely the girls did not have classes together throughout the day. We randomly paired the girls up and asked them to interview each other using a set of five questions: If you had a million dollars, what would you do with it? What’s the most embarrassing thing that happened to you at school? What do you want to study in college? If you had a superhero power, what would it be? Name your most recent act of kindness. We then asked them to choose the most interesting response and tell a story about it. We encouraged them to tell stories in different ways, and they met our challenge! One student performed a skit, a few drew a comic strip about their story, and one student wrote her story.

Week 8: A Visit from Transportation Alternatives We welcomed Julia de Martini Day from New York City advocacy group Transportation Alternatives to give a presentation about safe streets and what it means to engage in healthy living in an urban area. Students reimagined what a nearby city street would be like with more bike lanes, wider sidewalks, and more greenery.

Weeks 9 and 10: Design Challenge In our final two classes, students tackled the Classroom of the Future. We led them through a rapid design process to identify problems that exist in the classroom and challenged them to develop creative solutions to make the learning experience better for both teachers and students.

March + April 2012