Design like you mean it, kids!

Design competitions and charrettes are regular occurrences for architects, urban planners, engineers, and other design professionals. Creating something with a team in a finite time period to solve a challenge is a right of passage that begins in university and continues throughout the career trajectory. My architect friends tell me it is a powerful learning experience – intense and grueling, but powerful nonetheless.  To fully engage in this type of experience, one has to utilize numerous intelligences, apply a variety of information, arrive with an open mind and employ a focused and sustained vision to create something innovative and exceptional that addresses the challenge at hand.

Design challenges are typically offered to grown-ups. However, every June, the Salvadori Center holds an all-day design challenge for children. This year we held our 14th annual Charrette at the World Financial Center Winter Garden in New York City for 100 city schoolkids and their teachers, all of whom had had experienced Salvadori in their classrooms earlier in the year.

Unlike some other design challenges, ours is not a competitive event - we focus more on collaboration and presentation…but nonetheless, the experience is intense and rigorous and well, exhausting.  Arriving early in the morning, the Salvadori kids were split into small teams and assigned a working station full of sketching, measuring and model making materials. There they met their mentors – all architects, engineers or contractors from the some of the city’s leading firms, and dove right into the work.

This year, we challenged the students to create a monument and park that honored those lost in the devastating earthquake in Haiti. They produced inviting and diverse designs that mirrored the rich culture of the island nation. Themes of hope and support, change and tenacity, were found in their models. Kids spoke of wanting to see “a new sun shine on Haiti”.  We were blessed this year to have five Haitian architects and engineers join us – their mentees were able to hear first hand how much this project meant to them and the land they call home.  At the height of the event, the Palm Court was buzzing with kids sketching, building, decorating, debating, compromising, and laughing.

At 2:00 each team presented their designs to the group: children and adults alike admired one another’s work, asked questions, and took photos.  By 3:30, the Winter Garden was empty, yet the air remained filled with excitement and satisfaction. Throughout the years, I have heard over and over from former participants how charrette was a highlight of their entire school career. Students cite the excitement of working side by side with design professionals who help them realize their ideas, the opportunity to meet and collaborate with students from other schools, and the beauty of the landmark space where the charrette takes place. They recall the pressure and intensity – and the pizza. For Salvadori, it means another school year has successfully closed and we can head into summer knowing that we did our part to enrich those childrens’ lives.

Having Fun With The National Science Foundation

One of the best parts of my job is spending time with other educators and thinkers: sharing best practices, exchanging ideas, developing collaborations. I recently spent nine days on the road doing National Science Foundation (NSF) related work. First stop, San Francisco where I gathered with colleagues on the MAPPD project (Museums Afterschool: Principles, Data and Design) at the Exploratorium, the seminal hands-on museum of science, art, and human perception. We have been collecting and reviewing video segments from our programs with the aim to create a framework to analyze out-of-school science learning. Fabulous bonus: Playing in the Exploratorium.

I then headed to NSF headquarters in Arlington VA to sit on a Discovery Research K-12 grant review panel. While I cannot give any details – top secret stuff - I can say that I learned a great deal in those two days and enjoyed meeting some amazing educators and advocates. Fabulous bonus: Time to actually apply learnings to the Salvadori Center’s next grant to this federal agency!

Finally, I wrapped things up in Washington DC at the CAISE (Center for the Advancement of Informal Science Education) a gathering of 400 practitioners who oversee science programming in museums, afterschool programs and other informal settings. Days of discussion were followed with networking receptions. I got to see old friends and make some new ones. Fabulous bonus: The comedic stylings of the brilliant Neil DeGrasse Tyson, the director of the Hayden Planetarium at the American Museum of Natural History.

Engineering Equals Better Science Education

For 17 years I've been a science educator and yet I am still amazed by how poorly science is done in many schools. Of special note, is the real lack of Engineering in K-12 education, as reported recently by the National Academy of Engineering and the National Research Council. According to their research, engineering is the "neglected E of STEM [Science, Technology, Engineering, Math]. The report also points out the limited amount of teacher education in engineering.

Engineering education could not only provide learners with meaningful content but also an understanding of the design and problem-solving processes involved in the field. The report calls for federal agencies and foundations to identify exemplary K-12 engineering programs...but where can they be found? Thankfully many wonderful informal science education settings and programs are around to complement - or rather supplement - what children aren't getting in schools, some of which are focused on various aspects of engineering. And then there is the Salvadori Center. Salvadori has worked for 25 years to bring structural and civil engineering to students - especially students in under-resourced schools and communities. Today, we continue to find ways to ensure that all of our programs provide children the opportunity to explore engineering, the design process, and collaborative problem solving. By using a skyscraper as a learning springboard, kids and teachers learn Science through an exploration of forces, Technology by examining tools of construction, Math by calculating load and doing measurement, and Engineering by confronting a building challenge and applying their STEM knowledge to design, build and test a model. We also give our constituents the bonus letter A (thus, STEAM) by adding Architecture into the mix and allowing them to examine aesthetics and history in their local built world.

Our founder, world-renowned engineer Dr. Mario Salvadori knew that engineering was important for children and teachers. He saw the power this area of study held not just for content but also for process. The Salvadori Center hopes to be a model for engineering education and invites you to collaborate with us in this important area.

Learning In 3D

A version of this was previously published at Forbes.com

Recently the Burj Khalifa -- the world’s tallest tower -- opened in Dubai. At 2,717 feet tall it easily outdistances the previous record-holder, Taipei 101, by 1,047 feet — and is almost twice as tall as the Empire State Building. Aside from questions about the money spent or whether this was a good use of resources, the sheer achievement should be celebrated, not just by architects, engineers or photographers, but by educators – K-12 educators – in 3D.

The bulk of classroom teaching, particularly in math, is 2D. We look at numbers, we compute numbers, we teach kids to compute numbers. That’s it. But what if we demonstrate those numbers -- make them come alive in a spectacular, 3D way? Wouldn’t that help make the numbers more meaningful? It’s one thing to say the Burj Khalifa is almost twice as big as the Empire State Building, but if we get students to design and build scale models of both and compare them side-by-side, they’ll learn things they can’t learn any other way:

  • They’ll learn to calculate on a large scale, the way architects/engineers do
  • They learn to build scale models as part of a team
  • They’ll find ways to get their scale models to stand up without toppling over—learning basic principles of engineering and science. These principles were brilliantly outlined by the late Mario Salvadori in his seminal book, “Why Buildings Stand Up”.
  • They’ll see and appreciate just how amazing an achievement Burj Khalifa is—in 3D—by comparing their scale models of the Burj and the Empire State Building
  • They’ll have a better understanding of the math, science, teamwork and genius involved in Burj Khalifa because, literally, they’ll have done the same thing, in their own way

In education this practice is called project based learning, but at Salvadori, we could just as easily call it Learning in 3D. For one thing, kids would understand concepts better—and be more motivated to learn it. For another, we already have the technology and means to do it in our classrooms. So why don’t we use it more?

It’s an accepted fact that the U.S. lags far behind other developed countries at the K-12 level in terms of measured performance in math and science. Since our current math and science education isn’t working--why not try it in 3D? We practically invented the skyscraper. In the 21st century, shouldn’t we reinvent it—along with the educational system that helped bring it about?