Design Club Journal — Week 8
I started to take notes whilst running Design Club this week, in prep for our journal update. This was the heading I made on the move — it says it all: No fear, go with the flow, pragmatic, risk takers!
Chris and I ran Design Club this week, so we were able to split up and catch up with each group and find out what they had been up to. Jo covered weeks 4 -7 so we had a lot to catch up on!
We started with a quick brain warm up (picked up from a fellow learner whilst in Nürnberg during #TiSDD training last year at WorkPlayExperience). This got all the young people on their feet, working together, warmed up mentally and physically before we started!
We have a varied mix of learners. Over the weeks, although we follow the slides, we don’t present them to the class, the young people get disengaged quickly. We stick to having a quick catch up, getting the young people to tell us what they have learned so far before firing straight back into the activities to allow for a full 30/40 minutes of working.
Turn out has been relatively good since starting, with 11 mini designers joining us for week 8.
Everyone is at different stages, with some missing a week or two here and there, throughout December. We have young people that want to work on their own and share their ideas as they go with other working individually. We have some who don’t want to draw, some that want to build instead. We have been really flexible to give the children a personalised experience, as such!
There are a couple doing empathy maps, a couple creating logos for their apps with tag lines, one building screens from Lego rather than drawing and one group starting to use the Marvel app to bring their apps to life.
The group picked healthy eating as their design challenge to work on. Great ideas and apps including a fruit finder app with points to be collected and rewards of free fruit vouchers, an Evil Stepmother game where you avoid bad foods from Step Mum and build a six pack by eating fruit, a yoga app that tracks your activity and food intake and a smashing smoothies guide!
The young people have some excellent ideas. Their imagination runs wild and it’s inspiring to watch them build on their thoughts, ideas and develop these together. The templates provided by the Design Club are ideal for the young people to engage with and easy to explain. We always remind the kids, it’s about the design process drawing them back to the healthy eating challenge at hand.
To finish up, we got each group to present their ideas and apps to the wider group. Each group had only 30 seconds to share their ideas. Jack stole the show with his Mr Chips game built in LEGO. All the young people had questions and wanted to know more. We were extremely proud of Jack presenting and all the young people for their hard work so far!
After a tough and busy day, heading to Design Club is the best kind of therapy. Chris and I left with a smile on our faces saying, ‘We NEEDED that!’.
No better way to relieve stress than to design with young people.
