Welcome to my journey

In 2017, I was awarded a Premier’s TAFE NSW Scholarship, part of the NSW Premier’s Teacher Scholarship program, which provides funding for an overseas study tour. This blog is intended to be a record of my journey in 2018.

Creativity is an attribute that is highly sought after by employers, as it contributes to innovation and self-efficacy, and is something that can be both learned and taught. STEM industries are also the fastest growing areas for jobs.

I will be studying STEM partnerships between higher education institutions and businesses, including startup programs and makerspaces. Makerspaces are a way of incorporating the arts into technology (also known as STEAM) and provide a place for students to engage in creative problem solving and activities that spark their curiosity. I’ll also be looking at design thinking, which is another way of promoting creativity and finding creative solutions to problems.

By applying the knowledge learned in this study tour, I hope that students will:

• become creative and innovative problem solvers
• work collaboratively
• increase their confidence and interest in STEM careers
• increase their engagement, leading to fewer dropouts.

Final thoughts

My study tour culminated in writing a formal report, which I’ve included here.

All good things must come to an end

The last few days of my study tour were spent doing a number of things. I did a tour of Autodesk Pier 9 in San Francisco, which does innovative research and development. They first started as a makerspace then expanded to include an artist’s residency program. This then expanded to other residencies including academic (for professors and teachers), impact (for those doing social good in the world) and innovator (open to those with a broad background, with a willingness to explore and openness to learning). By bringing these cohorts together they get a cross-pollination of ideas and natural collaboration.

They also have customer residencies which are small technology intensives where customers test unreleased software to come up with solutions for their industry. While the customer residencies only last a few weeks, the main residencies run for a longer period.

Autodesk has a number of other centres around the world including:

• Boston, which has robots building houses and 3D printing concrete and is better set up for tours than the Pier 9 facility
• Birmingham, UK, which has an advanced manufacturing facility working on enterprise solutions for aerospace and automotive industries
• Toronto, Canada, which has the Mars innovation facility (which is North America’s largest innovation hub) and has research groups exploring future and emerging technology, such as machine learning and artificial intelligence
• Kilsyth, Australia, which has a research hub and materials lab.

I also managed to catch up with another scholarship recipient, Brendan, who happened to be doing the same tour!

After this tour, I continued up the road to the Autodesk Gallery, which has many fabulous artworks on display that have been designed or 3D printed in collaboration with Autodesk.

I also visited the Googleplex, Google’s headquarters in Mountain View, California. The outside area is a tourist attraction and open to the public, however it’s not so easy to get inside so I had to be satisfied with looking at the crazy statues and colourful bikes!

Another interesting visit was to the Computer History Museum, also in Mountain View. I particularly liked the kitchen computer which doubled as a cutting board! And of course the pretty dragonfly display.

I’ve had a fabulous time and learned so much! Many thanks to the NSW Premier’s Teacher Scholarships and TAFE NSW for putting their faith in me to represent them.

 

A new wave school

One of my final visits was to the Nueva School (Bay Meadows Campus) over two days. On my first visit I was given a tour of the school and I was invited back to attend the Nueva Quest Expo, where students presented their Nueva Quest projects. The Nueva School is a private school for gifted children and runs classes from Pre-school aged children up to Year 12.

Nueva was established about 50 years ago and has always been a progressive school, however embraced design thinking in its curriculum 15 years ago when David Kelley (who founded the Stanford d.school) had a child at the school and encouraged them to introduce it. The school looked like an amazing place to be a student – there were open learning places, interesting cubicles for working or just sitting, and lots of student work on display.

We had a look at the Invention Studio, the school’s makerspace area, where students work on social problems and spend the semester using the design thinking process trying to solve the problems. Examples include a smart wallet for blind people to help them identify the denominations of their notes, and creating improved animal shelters for rescue animals. There are areas for ideation, then rapid prototyping to bringing it to scale (the design thinking process).

All 9^th graders take design thinking as a full year course. In the first semester they’re focusing on coding, developing user-centred design with an emphasis on building websites and writing code. The second semester is about fabrication, physically constructing things, using additional mediums they want the students to be able to work in. So the teachers know that when the students get to 10^th grade, the students have a tendency towards design thinking as well as the toolkit of skills of knowing how to write computationally, program and how to build.

The content that they teach is often driven by questions from the students and becomes more personalised. They realise that not every student needs to go the same route to get to the same destination. They are also driven by masteries and try not to move people on until they’ve fully established proficiency in a given area.

I asked how they ensure that they cover and assess required curriculum content when it’s delivered in such a different way. They take the common core standards, which are shared nationally, as well as add more things that they believe should be taught, separate out each standard and group them into clusters (interestingly, clustering units is something I already do. They then design relevant projects that are integrated and create the space to instigate students to ask questions that develop their thinking. They’re trying to de-emphasise “what’s the right answer?” but “what’s the pathway to get the answer?”. When they teach chemistry, they don’t call it chemistry – the content is about chemistry, but the emphasis is about how you design and run a lab, how you analyse the data, how you share that information with others. Professional fields are changing – they need people to be dynamic, flexible, collaborative problem solvers.

The school is part of a collection of schools that are trying to upend the traditional transcript. They are building some pilot courses which are trans-disciplinary and rooted in core competencies. They start with what they want the students to learn, figure out acceptable pieces of evidence and develop some inspiring courses.

Next up was attending the Nueva Quest Expo. The Nueva Quest is a year long project taken by Upper High School (years 9-12) students. They work on a project of their own choosing in an area they’re passionate about with the help of a mentor. They may work on one area over the four years, or do different Quests each year. I spoke to a few of the students who were very articulate and passionate about their projects. Some of the disciplines covered included coding, electronics, creative writing, cooking, engineering, science, languages, design, art, photography and set design. One particularly impressive project involved mandala-like patterns designed in Illustrator, then laser cut in layers from thin pieces of timber.

Another had designed a hoverboard (not yet working, but still trying!).

A really interesting one was a student who made beautiful fractal images from mathematical formulas.

The Nueva School was such an inspiring place and it’s clear why the students enjoy it so much.

Solving problems creatively

It’s now the last week of my study tour and I’m moving on from Atlanta to Palo Alto and San Francisco. First stop is the d.school at Stanford University to do an introductory design thinking workshop. Many of the conference seminars I attended and people I’ve spoken to so far have referenced design thinking so I was looking forward to this workshop. It was a very brief overview (3 hours), just enough to whet our appetite.

Design thinking is a way of solving problems in a creative way. Some of the main elements of design thinking include empathising with the user (making the problem solving human-centred), generating a lot of ideas (ideating) and experimenting with your ideas by prototyping and testing. We started out by making a pair of glasses – we were provided with disposable prototyping materials like pipe cleaners, aluminium foil and plastic straws. Here’s a picture of mine:

Next, we were asked to make a pair of glasses for a superhero. We needed to think about what a superhero would need so I added foil to the lenses to protect the superhero’s eyes from the bad guy’s raygun, as well as adding pipe cleaners to the arms to make sure the glasses stayed on their head when they’re flying. Ideas from other people included adding foil to keep their hair out of their eyes when flying, and a visor to keep the sun off their face.

We split into groups to work on a problem: a local restaurant has become very popular and has long waiting times, and they want to help them have a great time while they’re waiting. also want to promote the local neighbourhood. We generated lots of ideas using sticky notes – these allow everyone to have a voice – and were encouraged to say yes to all ideas. This is a form of brainstorming where you accept all ideas in the ideation process. Various constraints were also added to allow for more creativity, including making the waiting time a chance to discover the neighbourhood, and every idea must cost at least $1 million to create. Then we were given coloured stickers to vote for our two favourite ideas. Our eventual idea was an app that went through the history of the neighbourhood. We prototyped our app using materials like play-doh, foil and plastic cups. The final step was testing our app with another group and getting their feedback.

I found the whole experience very enjoyable and I will definitely be going through the free resources on the d.school’s website to learn how I can implement design thinking in my work.

I also did a walking tour of Stanford and found out some interesting things about the university, like the full name is The Leland Stanford Junior University and it was founded in 1885 by California Senator Leland Stanford and his wife, Jane, in memory of their only child, Leland Jr., who died of typhoid fever at 15. It’s also a very beautiful campus.

 

Meet the future engineers

My last visit in Atlanta was with STE(A)M Truck who run mobile STEAM classes with children. They were doing a program for the Chattahoochee YMCA Head Start Academy with pre-school aged children. They run programs over a few days or longer, teaching children about musical instruments, machines and tools. One of the maker mentors, Kellie, talked to me about teaching the kids about machines.

Because of the younger age of these students, the activities were very introductory and didn’t include some of the usual activities such as soldering. There were four activity stations set up:

• Musical instruments: they created their own instruments from attaching elastic bands to hoops
• Machines: using lego, wooden dowels and other plastic shapes, they built simple machines (such as a catapult)
• Tools: students sawed into pool noodles and hammered “nails”(golf tees) into clay
• Technology: they learned about batteries and made torches

Art and design towards innovation

I had a very interesting conversation with Wayne Li, a Professor with the School of Industrial Design at Georgia Tech.

We started by talking about the Capstone Design course which is a senior project in the last semester. It’s the culmination of what the students have learned throughout their course. Students from different disciplines work together for real clients on projects that are interesting, challenging and creative. They work in teams of 4-5 and present their final products in an Expo at the end of the semester. It started as an Engineering showcase however is now open to other disciplines which has included mechanical engineering, biomedical engineering, civil engineering, industrial engineering, aerospace engineering, architecture, industrial design and public policy.

This then morphed into a conversation about his work with the Innovation and Design Collaborative, known as the Design Bloc. Wayne had previously worked with the d.school at Stanford University and wanted to recreate that idea at Georgia Tech. Multidisciplinary classes are delivered, centred around design thinking. They use creative and designer mindsets to improve how students think, how they examine and question problems and build up their creative confidence. Jobs of the future will be multidisciplinary, broader than one narrow focus. The things that will make students productive in the workforce in the future are things that aren’t held by one discipline, for example, creativity and empathy. Engineers are usually given a list of requirements for something they need to build however they need to question why it needs to be that way so that new ideas can emerge.

Some of the Design Bloc classes already existed when Wayne came in, others they created fresh, however they reworked the way that they were taught.

Wayne suggested that a way to win over staff who may be resistant to change is through the satisfied students – they clamour for the courses and tell their friends. He suggested you don’t need to change the content of your courses, just change the delivery – the style and experience of it. He says that there is a currently a groundswell of design thinking and your college can be at forefront and become a thought leader by changing the way you think.

My final conversation at Georgia Tech was with Madison Cario, Director of the Office of the Arts. She discussed the Activate, Engage, Produce project as a means of developing creativity and innovation through art.

• Activate: Creative Placemaking – placing public art around the campus as a way of enriching the campus life. For example, pianos around campus, theatre productions, public art, maker community. Art is good for our mental health, however you don’t want to force it on people, so pieces (like the pianos and sculptures) are placed around campus and people will come to it.
• Engage: Creative Curricular Initiatives (CCI) – CCI is about infusing creative practice into the curriculum. Collaborations between visiting artists and existing courses attempt to expose students to the artistic process in order to develop their creativity and innovation. The goal is to make innovation and creative thinking fundamental characteristics of its graduates. Mentoring is key to making this process work.
• Produce: Made@GT – this is about students, faculty and artists collaborating in making art and producing creative projects. Art is used as the vehicle to share research and information. Made@GT projects are encouraged to tour locally, nationally and internationally.

It’s early days with this project so it’s hard to say how well it’s working, but anecdotal evidence suggests good things.

Inventing at Georgia Tech

Amit Jariwala is the Director of Design & Innovation in the School of Mechanical Engineering at Georgia Tech and was kind enough to take me around the Invention Studio and the IDEA Lab.

The IDEA lab can be booked for classes which are split between rooms where they can use the lathe and milling machine, or program computer chips. Students can also use the rooms outside of class time. Several years ago they realised that they weren’t teaching enough hand-on skills to their engineers and wanted to introduce more making into the course. They also wanted to make it more fun by gamifying the system, so they have a competition for teams to make a machine to do a specific task – the members of the winning team each get an iPad. For this particular class, called Creative Decisions and Design, the teams are provided with a kit worth US$1000 and they can spend up to US$100 on additional equipment. They want the students to work within constraints so that they can be creative. The machines they make also need to be packed up into a certain size. The students soon realise that that it’s better to do a few tasks well rather than trying to do more tasks and risk not being able to get them all working.

The Invention Studio is staffed by volunteer students and has laser cutters, 3D printers, sewing machines, as well as wood, metal and electrotechnology tools. This space is open to anyone on campus (not just engineering students) from 10am to 6pm Monday to Friday, however in return for volunteering 3 hours per week, these students get 24/7 access. It can be used for course projects as well as personal projects. Students are required to bring their own materials as they don’t have room for storage, apart from the 3D printers as it’s easier to have the material preloaded into the machines. Volunteer students can choose to become a master on a particular machine, which is good for their resume as they’ll have specialist knowledge. The studio decided to use volunteers rather than paying them because they want passionate, motivated people – they now have hundreds of willing volunteers. They also provide a lounge area for the students to relax in. When students come in to use a particular machine, they’ll see the other machines that are available and get the creative confidence to realise more ideas.

They have a bank of low-resolution 3D printers which are mostly used by Capstone Design students for building prototypes and mockups of their designs.

For final production, they use the professional, high-resolution 3D printers which are handled by staff only. In recent years, more attention has been placed on computing and software that people have lost interest in manufacturing, so they wanted to make it more fun. They have lots of corporate sponsors for the Capstone Design course so that students can work on real projects. A current project is for Hanes, an underwear brand, to redesign the underwires they use in their bras.

Everything in the Invention Studio was started on a small scale, with one room and a handful of student volunteers. It grew from the bottom up and is more ingrained in the culture now. Different departments began intermingling and trusting each other, so they removed some walls to open up the space.

Entrepreneurial Thinking at Georgia Tech

I continued my trip in Atlanta by visiting Georgia Tech over two days. Es from the Office of the Arts was very helpful in taking me around to various sections.

My first meeting was with Melissa Heffner and Keith McGreggor from the Venture Lab, which is the home of commercialisation at Georgia Tech.

The Venture Lab has two main thrusts: helping students, faculty and staff start up and spinout companies; and entrepreneurial education. They have a relationship with the National Science Foundation and its Innovation Corps (I-Corps) program which assists their researchers to create startups based on what they’ve been working on in their labs. This then had a positive effect on teaching all over the campus as it was so effective. They also want undergraduates to be entrepreneurial and the Create X program exists to inspire entrepreneurial thinking. GT-1000 is a recommended Freshman seminar class which now also discusses all entrepreneurial-minded things available on campus, to expose students to this mindset early on.

Additional startup classes include Startup Lab, Idea to Prototype and Startup Launch. In the first class they form teams of 4-5 student to do a needs analysis for a startup. This includes finding out who the customer might be and often involves talking to thousands of people. They learn how to listen, about cognitive biases, as well as running a business. The second class is about prototyping, including using makerspaces. The hope is that they take their idea from the Startup Lab and progress it here. The final class is a Capstone class run over the Summer period where the teams present a final project and make a launchable company. They get a stipend (akin to a research grant). To gain access to this class the students have to interview and pitch their project. It’s a zero credit class so is open to existing students as well as those who have just finished.

The Venture Lab has connected all departments – previously they didn’t talk to each other, now they are sharing resources and teaching the latest thinking. Because of these strong relationships, Venture Lab are more aware of the projects that are being worked on and often can see whether projects can be commercialised even if the researchers can’t.

Goodbye Austin, Hello Atlanta

Well it’s time to say goodbye to Austin and travel to Atlanta. I must say I’m happy to see the back of the motel I’ve stayed in for the last few weeks but I’d love to come back to Austin (especially SXSW!).

The AirBnB I’m in here is lovely (let me know if you want a recommendation) but the public transport is a bit lacking, the buses are usually late and run infrequently. Anyway, I managed to make it to Piedmont Park for the last day of the Atlanta Science Festival. Specifically I went to meet up with Jason Martin from STE(A)M Truck (I’ll be observing a school session with them later in the week) who provides mobile STEAM classes to K-12 school students. In the video below, Jason discusses the role of their staff members.

Although the festival was focused on science (not my area!), there were some interesting displays. Different zones were sponsored by places such as Georgia Tech, Emory University, Georgia State University, IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers), Google and Delta Airlines. The university stands were run by students and teachers showing interesting experiments and inventions, including this jelly (or jello for Americans) piano made by engineering students from Georgia Tech.

Others promoted summer camps and workshops in robotics, programming, games design and coding for kids. A program called EarSketch developed by a student from Georgia Tech allows you to learn coding through music. IEEE provides online resources through many websites including:

• ieee.org/education
• tryengineering.org
• trycomputing.org

University of Texas Part 2

Another makerspace on campus that I visited was the Digital Fabrication Lab (Fab Lab for short). This lab is part of the Department of Art and Art History and is only open to students within this department. They have different types of 3D scanners, including a handheld structured light scanner which can scan from the size of a golf ball to the size of a car, a laser scanner and a photogrammetry scanner which creates a 3D model from multiple photos taken from different angles. Other equipment includes 3D printers, laser cutters (for cutting wood, plexiglass etc.) and routers (for wood, alabaster, soapstone, aluminium, brass).

Students generally use the equipment for their course projects – they may create prototypes using low-resolution models made from cheaper materials, or final high-resolution productions – and are charged cost price on the consumables. It’s built into the Freshman courses that students have to use the Fab Lab to ensure that they have a basic understanding of the equipment and know what’s available. The staff also give a lot of assistance to students to help them with their projects, if needed.

The following video is Eric McMaster explaining how the structured light scanner works.

I spoke to Doreen Lorenzo, the Director of the Center for Integrated Design. Doreen is a proponent of using design thinking and incorporating this into the curriculum. There is a human-centred component, understanding what people want as well as collaboration – looking at problems by yourself won’t help solve the problem. With collaboration, you need different types of people to solve problems e.g. business, design, technical.

Organisations want employees to have other skills (apart from technical knowledge), they need to be able to understand and work with people and the University of Texas is now trying to emulate this. Students will be taught in the workplace, by experts using real-life projects.

In this video, Doreen discusses these skills that businesses want from their employees.

As a result of this, UT will contribute to a differentiated workforce, where the students have more capacity and are more open to making change. The university was very eager to implement these changes and started by integrating design thinking at the undergraduate level.

Doreen suggested to address negativity in trying to implement something like this that you shouldn’t use words like disruption and change as they have negative connotations. Start small and get success on a small level, as everyone wants to rally around success. Your students will be your best advocates.

Doreen was instrumental in introducing some new courses at UT and I was able to sit in on an animation class. I briefly spoke to the lecturer and a student who talked about the project-based and collaborative nature of the course to ensure that the students will be getting the skills that employers want.

I was also taken around some of the classrooms where they have multiple screens around the room which students can connect to on their devices for their own personal display. They may run classes in the rooms, or the students can do independent study as well as groupwork. The screens and projectors are controlled either through a tablet device or from controls in the room. Students can either bring their own laptops or there is a laptop cart which they can access.

Me with Mackenzie and Boris from the Foundry.