Design Lab—Maker Space for Bronx Community Research Projects!
My students need a shelving unit and design hardware to establish a creative design lab to improve the quality of their community oriented prototypes for their senior capstone research projects.
This project is a part of the Hispanic & Latinx Heritage Month celebration because
it supports a Latino teacher or a school where the majority of students are Latino.
My Students
We are a design thinking software development high school in the Belmont section of the Bronx that thrives on promoting curiosity and agency through community challenge-based learning. Most of us are preforming data-based research and developing living prototype solutions for the first time!
We are a community of learners and designers who challenge each other to reflect, exchange ideas, and create a better, more just world.
In our senior year, students present 20 to 30 page solutions-oriented research projects that address a self-identified social problem. Class of 2018 senior projects included: "measuring correlation between school suspension rates and relevance of classroom lessons to students' lives", "redefining sexual health education to be inclusive of LGBTQI", "breaking the cycle of oppression through storytelling", "the absence of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in history teaching", and "misrepresentation and the erasing Black history in NYS exams", and many more.
We are excited to get more experience with designing solutions to our community's most pressing problems!
My Project
Throughout the Senior Capstone Community Research projects, we use the stages of design thinking—Empathize, Define, Ideate, Prototype, and Test—to develop community-based solutions to our most pressing problems.
Students will utilize the Design Lab Maker Space to ideate more innovative and creative solutions to the problem of their choosing.
The space will be open for students to engage in year-long design-style activities that will encourage thinking outside of the box. The eco shelves and bins will become the design station the houses supplies such as 100s of colorful Post-Its, big paper, chart paper, designer notebooks, and cardstock; colorful pens, markers, chalk and pencils; tools such as scissors, colorful tape, name tags, yarn, staplers, and rulers; and other inspiring materials such as found objects, glitters, and clay. The graphic tablets will be available for design teams to digitize their ideas. This space will be used as a creative outlet where design teams can invent, innovate, and store their creative solutions and comment in a community design learning environment.
Nearly all students from low‑income households
Data about students' economic need comes from the National Center for Education Statistics, via our partners at MDR Education. Learn more
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As a teacher-founded nonprofit, we're trusted by thousands of teachers and supporters across the country. This classroom request for funding was created by Ms. Stephina and reviewed by the DonorsChoose team.
