We closed the quarter on Friday with a number of incredible final projects in design, cartography and Sixteen. Some examples:

In design, Gabby and Carol responded to the final challenge (“propose something to improve the iSchool community”) with a project to create transparent mini-people in the windows throughout the 4th and 5th floors. They catch the light in the morning, and they’ve already received a lot of positive feedback from students in the halls.

In cartography, the final challenge was to propose a ~10-hour project that advanced our thinking around mapping in some way. Ehad depicted poor eyesight in the United States with a map that used tape to obscure the names of the states with the highest percentage of visually impaired residents.  Zineb created a 3D “underwater” map to depict the depth at which various sea creatures live. Sara created the United States in cookies and Albania in cake. And, Duncan compared countries by physical size and population using foam shapes.

In Sixteen, the final project asked students to document a youth subculture in film. Alex and Rondell interviewed “bikers,” a community they were unfamiliar with before beginning the project. Katie and Sally documented the chess community. Alena and Farzana documented the deaf community, and Kyra and Wendy investigated the effects of Hurricane Sandy.

]]> http://roomfourzerotwo.com/2012/11/18/news-from-room-402-november-2012/feed/ 0 IMG_3185 Christina Jenkins http://roomfourzerotwo.com/2012/10/09/gps-compasses-lets-go-geocaching-and-orienteering/ http://roomfourzerotwo.com/2012/10/09/gps-compasses-lets-go-geocaching-and-orienteering/#comments Wed, 10 Oct 2012 01:09:43 +0000 Christina Jenkins http://roomfourzerotwo.com/2012/10/09/gps-compasses-lets-go-geocaching-and-orienteering/ Read more]]> Thanks to a generous donation via DonorsChoose.org from the folks at Seattle-based Groundspeak, Room 402 just received a brand new Garmin GPS and 6 new compasses! We’re planning a field trip for early November to the Queens Museum of Art to check out the scale model of New York City and to do some geocaching (modern-day treasure hunting with GPS devices) and orienteering (a sport that involves wayfinding with a compass) in Flushing Meadows. We’re so grateful!

Bai Tu Long Bay fishing village, Vietnam. Photo credit – Liz and Tony Burrill, July 2012

Above: Ms. Fay and I traveled to Southeast Asia this summer, thanks to a Fund for Teachers grant we received through our work with The Sixteen Project. Learn more here, and if you’re a teacher, check out http://www.fundforteachers.org/.

Cartography: This course is all about mapping. We look at maps from political, artistic, digital, emotional and mathematical perspectives, and we ask questions about how images are used to illustrate statistics and tell stories. We began the course by drawing outlines of the United States from memory, analyzing map projections, drawing US states at various scales, and considering the problems that result from translating 3D spaces to 2D surfaces. We’re preparing to examine political borders and construct paper mache globes! Learn more about the course at http://roomfourzerotwo.com/cartography/.

Design: This course is about creative problem solving. We began by designing gifts to respond to a partner’s weakness, speed dating to facilitate conversation and empathy/understanding for others, and a Project Runway challenge for some quick prototyping. The first challenge of the course is inspired by Jamie Oliver’s campaign to help young people make healthier eating choices. (See details of the challenge on OpenIDEO.) That project will run through the creative process by first determining what factors influence young people’s eating decisions, identifying a specific problem, brainstorming solutions to this problem, and prototyping and testing that solution.

Sixteen: This is a cultural anthropology course that investigates coming-of-age in New York City and around the world. We began with a few classic intro-to-anthro texts (Nacirema, Eating Christmas in the Kalahari), and are now reading “The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down,” the true account of a Hmong family’s encounter with western medicine as refugees in California. (I strongly recommend this book to anyone interested in ethics, medicine, or culture.) We’ve touched on the work of Napoleon Chagnon, the famous (and controversial) anthropologist, engaged in some preliminary ethnographic fieldwork (through a project that asked students to document their daily lives in photos), and have considered the extent to which language influences thought. We’ll be doing a field trip to Chinatown for dim sum on Tuesday, and students will be creating a mini documentary about that experience.

And more: The Brooklyn Robot Foundry is looking for high school interns. They understand that iSchool students can’t get to Brooklyn until 4, and are willing to accommodate. Please let me know if you’re interested – they’d really like to work with the iSchool. I’ll be attending the Cooper Hewitt Teen Design Fair on October 15 with iSchool students who are interested in pursuing design-related interests in high school, college and beyond. I went last year AND MET TIM GUNN, and look forward to going again. All students are invited to join, please RSVP ASAP.

1) Technovation teams: Last spring, Julie Fetzner and I coached 11 girls through the Technovation competition, a program aimed at inspiring young women to enter tech fields through a mobile app design challenge. We sent two teams to the NYC pitch night in April (photos here), and Element Quest won the top prize and the privilege of participating in the national competition at Intel in California (photos here). Element Quest didn’t place nationally, but we had an incredible experience in the Bay Area.

2) The Microsoft Partners in Learning US Forum: Francesca Fay and I were invited to share our work on #Disastercamp with 100+ educators from around the country at the Microsoft campus in Redmond, Washington in July (photos here).

After the Department of Education released its social media guidelines several weeks ago, Beth Fertig from WNYC stopped by the iSchool to talk to students and faculty about their reactions. We use social media in many aspects of our work, from the #disastercamp hashtag on Twitter to the http://www.thesixteenproject.wordpress.com WordPress blog. You can read her full report here!

Cartography: This course uses mapping to ask questions about how we perceive the world, how images are used to illustrate statistics and tell stories, and how we translate 3D spaces to 2D surfaces. We began the course by drawing outlines of the United States from memory, analyzing and reproducing map projections (see above), and drawing US states at a scale of 1 in=24 miles. We’re preparing to construct paper mache globes this week! Learn more about the course at http://roomfourzerotwo.com/cartography/.

#Disastercamp: This course considers the extent to which “natural” disasters are grounded in social factors (like poverty, or politics), and students have spent the first two weeks of the course studying those circumstances. In the first week, we examined the idea of “vulnerability” to natural hazards and watched a video about a community in Managua, Nicaragua. Based on research, students proposed new inventions for disaster prevention or response in Managua. In our second week together, we looked to Haiti as a case study in how social factors exacerbate the effects of a natural hazard. Students played a number of games that were designed to educate communities about the importance of disaster preparedness, and are now developing their own board games to educate players about why Haitians were so vulnerable to the 2010 earthquake. Learn more about the course at http://roomfourzerotwo.com/disastercamp/.

Additionally: Ms. Fetzner and I coach a team of 11 iSchool girls who will be competing in the Technovation Challenge, a nationwide competition to build an innovative science education mobile app using App Inventor for Android. Our girls have developed two prototypes, and their final presentation is at Google on the evening of April 25 – reserve a free ticket here.