Liberty Insight

My design studio recently sponsored an inspiring event produced by Raaya Design called Protothon: Designing Hands-on Learning Experiences. Roughly twenty participants including educators, designers, parents, and even some elementary school students broke into teams of 4-5 to brainstorm on a variety of topics related to education. The topics ranged from creating learning games, to re-imagining the future of education. The groups then used some quick prototyping techniques to develop and then present their ideas to the other groups.

Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to see all of the presentations, but the ones I did see were packed with creative ideas and solutions. There was a really cool collaborative learning game where teammates took turns rolling dice like cubes. One teammate could add or multiply and the other could the subtract or divide the numbers on the dice until they reached a target number. Another project involved designing a more open community campus where various learning areas were centered around a courtyard and interspersed with working businesses such as a doctor’s office or a general store. The parents and students could use the businesses and the students could learn about and even help run them.

One idea that I thought was super cool was transforming the grade level system into a “badging” system. Instead of students being grouped according to age and taking a fixed curriculum each year, students would receive badges when they mastered a certain topic. Some badges such as grade level reading and math would be required for graduation. Students could learn at their own pace with students at their skill level as opposed to their age level, with the end goal being mastering the material. Advanced students could knock out their basic badges and then move on to fun and interesting badges of their choice like multi-media or science projects. This reminded me of Cub Scouts, where it was actually fun to learn a new skill and a friendly competition to earn badges.

The passion and excitement of the participants was immediately evident. It reminded me a lot of the thriving tech and entrepreneurial culture here in San Francisco and Silicon Valley. Teams were (to use a stale, overused cliche) thinking outside the box. They were building off of each other’s ideas, smashing down existing paradigms and building whole new ones from scratch. They had no vested interests and few limitations from pre-conceived notions. They simply asked, “what are the possibilities for education?” And in six short hours, these twenty strangers had come up with numerous ideas that were vastly superior to our current system.

The whole experience just reinforced my belief that there is no shortage of extremely intelligent, creative, dedicated, hard-working, conscientious people trying to solve the problems we face with education in America. And while new to me, apparently many of these ideas from the Protothon (and many other great ideas) have been floating around education circles for years. So why is our education system in such a sorry state? Continue reading →