NOVA Lab–First Day…First Iteration

Today, August 26th , marked the kick off of what we in this class are designing as a a year of deeper learning and immense good through human-centered design and social entrepreneurship.  Our new, year-long class, inNOVAtion Lab, actually a reboot of a semester-long class that ran in 2016–17 called Design Lab, is modeled on the work of Don Wettrick and his “Innovation and Open-Source Learning” class at Noblesville HS, Indiana.

We started our day by listening to our teacher, Mr Heidt, talk about the inception of the class and how it came to be.  But he also spent a good deal of time talking about story as a concept for structuring what we’ll be doing in this class.  He also talked a bit about community and how important it would be to create a strong classroom community, especially since the class will be, eventually, run largely by us.  A tight-knit community will be necessary if we’re going to offer honest critiques and feedback of each other’s work.

But for most of the class, we thought about, shared, and presented our responses to the question, “Why did you take this class.”  Below is a gallery of our responses.  After working through some simple affinity mapping, it became clear that most of the groups’ ideas centered on “Personal fulfilment,” “the people and concept of the class,” and “the environment” which clearly challenged the way things are/have been in most of our classes.

We set our sights on learning about and developing an entrepreneurial/innovator’s mindset for the days to come and left class “think[ing] things we [maybe] never thunk before.”