REBUILD GLOBALLY HAS BEEN MOBBED!

With six facilitators and two translators, KIDmob's first international workshop was a huge success! Yesterday's fast-paced design blitz took place at Rebuild Globally with twenty students (ages 14-25) from the apprenticeship program. Rebuild Globally is an NGO that creates a pathway out of poverty by empowering locals with jobs, and providing academic support. They do this through their mission of pulling trash off the streets of Haiti, making something with it, selling it overseas, and bringing income back to Haiti. Currently, they are cleaning up used tires and making sandals out of the rubber. The problem is that although they use most of the tire is in production, there is still some rubber leftover. This leftover rubber waste was the inspiration for our workshop curriculum!

During our time in Haiti, we have found that the educational approach here comes from the French, which means that a great deal of emphasis is placed on memorization and recall; basically the opposite of KIDmob’s creative problem solving pedagogy. However, we also discovered a cultural undercurrent called “rabòday,” or the “make it work” approach. It was in the spirit of rabòday that we mobbed Rebuild Globally on Saturday.

To begin the workshop we asked the students, “How many things can you do with a paper clip?”

After a downpour of ideas, and plenty of creative warm up, we shifted to tires. We gave each group a focus area - the tire as a unit (aggregate), deconstruction of the tire, integration of other materials, and physical properties (thermal mass, waterproof, etc.). Again, the space exploded with ideas in the form of colorful post-it notes, sketches, prototypes, and energy. Next, we jumped into the projects, and by the end of the day some incredible ideas were developed that Rebuild plans to test out and/or implement in the future!

We are excited to announce that eight of the students from Rebuild Globally will participate in our cross-cultural Youth Summit in April. Looking forward to the months ahead!

How's that for a new way to display sandals!

KIDMOB BACK IN HAITI

It has taken months, multiple visits to Haiti, and hard work, but KIDmob is very excited to announce that our first international workshop is this Saturday! We will be working with the students of Rebuild Globally's Apprenticeship Program. Rebuild makes eco-friendly sandals out of discarded tires. The opportunity: the sandals use most of the tire, but Rebuild has not figured out what to do with the remaining tire waste. This Saturday KIDmob will have a one-day design blitz to explore creative uses for the tire waste; perhaps for product display units or on-site seating. We are excited to see what the Rebuild apprentices come up with!

Next week we will head ten clicks down the road from Rebuild Globally to The Union School for a 3-day workshop with their students. The Union School is a pre-K to 12 educational institution with students from around the globe. We can’t wait to meet the kids! We are still narrowing the focus of the project for the 3-day workshop, but are very optimistic about working with the students.

In April, KIDmob will conduct the opus of our work here in Haiti: a 10-day design challenge called the Youth Summit! We plan to bring a crew of eight students from Indian Valley Academy (IVA) in Greenville, CA to Haiti with us. Each community group - Rebuild Globally, IVA, and The Union School - will present a need that they would like to design solutions for at the Youth Summit. Each team will choose a design challenge, and then they will have one week to execute the creative thinking process that KIDmob has empowered them with and propose or implement solutions. ‘The guys’ at iLab//Haiti will be our facilitators, along with US designers, and the KIDmob team. We can’t wait to see how all of our mobbing, teaching, ideating, and designing will come together at the Youth Summit.

But for now, KIDmob is really excited about mobbing Rebuild Globally this weekend, and we will keep you posted…

COMMON CORE AND TRANSFORMING EDUCATION

By Kate Ganim

Have you ever noticed that the way students are evaluated by teachers looks oddly similar to the way teachers are evaluated by administrators? Have you ever seen the parallel between administrators’ mandates being resisted by teachers and teachers’ mandates being resisted by students? Teachers decry the difficulties of classroom management, but have you ever tried to manage a classroom of teachers?

The school reinforces certain values and expectations in teachers and students alike. Which makes sense - it’s all part of the same ecosystem, after all.  

The values and expectations that have been common to the traditional school include: a top-down flow of orders and information, a singular definition of “intelligence” as measured by standardized tests, responding to failure with punishment, and a focus on facts and figures.

Great thinkers such as Ken Robinson have described this “factory” model of learning, as reinforcing students to be obedient and homogenous. This model proved very successful for preparing students to enter the Industrial Era workforce in repetitive factory jobs. Its relevance has waned as the Era of Information has risen.

Those same values - obedience and homogeneity - have been reinforced in teachers over the years. For over a decade, The No Child Left Behind Act has given teachers clear directives on what to teach and how to teach it.

We are faced with a tremendous opportunity for mainstream education. Common Core is an invitation for cultural shift, for the school to bring its values and expectations up-to-date with the demands of this century’s job market.  

Most states are requiring their teachers to implement Common Core in their classrooms. After years of clear directives on how to teach, teachers have suddenly been granted the freedom to teach how they want. Under Common Core, in addition to teaching students what they should know (knowledge), teachers are tasked with teaching students how to think (skills) “for success in college and careers.”  Take, for example, Common Core Standard CCSS.Math.Practice.MP1: to “Make sense of problems and persevere in solving them.” Who wouldn’t benefit from this skill in today’s world?

We recently had the opportunity to witness how educators are responding to Common Core, and to brainstorm approaches for its implementation. This happened at the Big Ideas Fest 2013 Conference, hosted by ISKME, in active breakout sessions called “Action Collabs.” These sessions were interspersed with TED-style talks, providing an innovative and compelling space to explore ideas with fellow conference-goers and take meaningful, collaborative action on important issues in education today. It was an incredibly powerful format: get riled up from inspiring talks, and then pour that energy into brainstorming real-world solutions. (Kudos to ISKME for developing such a brilliant and effective approach!)  

The consensus in our Action Collab was that educators are feeling panicked, confused, and unsupported by the new standards, and are grasping for more concrete direction. At the same time, they recognize the potential for innovation with the new standards, and are interested in finding a more effective approach.

The instinct of most educators is to jump to thinking about the student and the student’s experience, looking to make a remix of innovative solutions that have precedence within education. There were inspiring and exciting ideas abound. I think that all of the ideas we discussed could have worked.  

I’m not sure that’s a good thing.  

Leo F. Buscaglia said, “We seem to gain wisdom more readily through our failures than through our successes. We always think of failure as the antithesis of success, but it isn’t. Success often lies just the other side of failure.”                             

The onus is on educators and administrators to instigate the cultural shift invited by Common Core, and to offer each other support in doing so. What values and expectations do you want your school to impart?

Today’s “successful” student is a critical thinker and creative problem solver, who is able to work collaboratively, discover the answers to her own questions, adapt quickly and confidently to change, and who has technological fluency.

I would describe today’s “successful” educator and administrator in the same way.

Educators and administrators: Cultivate those 21st Century values and expectations in yourself. These are the skills that you will need in order to re-envision what you do and how you do it.  

Experiment. Use the 21st Century skills we expect of our students (eg, CCSS.Math.Practice.MP1 “Make sense of problems and persevere in solving them.”) to hack your syllabus. Test your ideas in the classroom. Recognize that you will never discover your limits without pushing them to the point of failure - you can always scale back from there. No idea is perfect the first time around - progress comes most quickly from rapidly testing a lot of ideas: fail fast, and fail often. If you’re having fun testing an idea out, chances are good that your students will be engaged with it, as well. And if they’re not engaged, use those critical thinking and adaptability skills of yours to figure out why it didn’t work and how you can make it better. Take advantage of the incredible resources and communities available online to exchange ideas, like ISKME’s OER, Next.cc, or Howtoons, to name a few.  

This is how we will catalyze true change in education.       

It will be messy. But messiness can cultivate delight. And exploration. And risk-taking. And plenty of failure.

CATAPULTING KIDMOB

2014. Wow. As we bypass our anniversary, it is truly amazing to consider how things have developed for our little startup over the past three years. It has been an incredible journey thus far. We have experienced the opportunity to work with so many impactful people: the kids - who are our constant source of inspiration and are at the core of every decision that we make as we grow, the teachers - agents of change and transformation not only in their schools but in their communities, the team - our headstrong and heartfelt director trifecta as well as our talented and passionate mob (without whom there would absolutely be no KIDmob), and the believers - our family, friends, community members, and like-minders. Without such a strong and loving foundation of support we would never be where we are today. Thank you! As we catapult into Winter 2014, our momentum is only going to snowball. We are forecasting many exciting things at KIDmob: creating workshop curriculum to collaborate with kids with upper limb differences (Superhero Cyborgs!), continuing to develop the iLab in Port-au-Prince, facilitating a STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, and Math) Fair for 150 kids in Plumas County, growing our relationships with local Bay Area middle schoolers, speaking at the AIA (American Institute of Architects) National Convention, continuing to work with communities to evangelize design education as a tool for creative problem solving, and learning, learning, forever learning. SO! With lots of love, energy, enthusiasm, a willingness to test and fail and test again, and unfaltering conviction, tally ho! A very Happy New Year to you, special reader, from everyone here at KIDmob, the mobile, kid-integrated design firm. 

PASSEPORT 02 - THIS THURSDAY!

KIDmob is throwing another fabulous fundraising bash! 

Ladies and Gentlemen, children of all ages (Above 21)! Welcome to the GREATEST event on earth! Welcome to PASSEPORT 02: an EXTRAVAGANT and SPECTACULAR party OF GRANDEUR! Come join our urban circus for a night of DRINKS, MUSIC, and HEART STOPPING FUN! FEATURING WES NEER as our Ringmaster and auctioneer conducting RAFFLES, DOOR PRIZES, and other festivities! Take your friends' hands and come on, for life is much more fun when two or three tag along! 
 

Life is a circus, and you live on the stage
Come be the audience of our three- ringed cage
It’ll be a night to remember, one not to miss 
A MAGNIFICENT party that is sure to end in bliss

$30 PREORDER ONLINE - $40 AT THE DOOR - $70 FOR TWO
LET THE CIRCUS BEGIN… and contribute freely as all the funds raised go to iLabHaiti, a project of KIDmob.

Get Tickets Here!
It would not be possible without the support of SpiderOak and Rebar. Thank you!

RECAP: THE 2013 BIG IDEAS FEST

The KIDmob director trifecta took a little road trip down to Half Moon Bay to attend ISKME's (Institute for the Study of Knowledge Management) Big Ideas Fest this year. What a blast! We have been followers of the work of ISKME for quite a while now, even interviewing Samantha Meazell, Director of Training and Design, as a part of our annual Friendship Month last July. The KIDmob team emphatically recommends the annual Big Ideas Fest event to all who might be interested. It was an active and inspirational four days of buzzing energy, discussion, learning, and thinking - the antithesis of doggedly spectating in a sea of anonymity to an onstage talking head from waywayway in the back, wondering upon departure if the conference you just observed (not participated in!) was truly worth your several hundred bucks and the time off of work. Instead we walked away refreshed and validated in what we do, with several new friends (WikiSeat, Sproutel, Losangelista, HighTechHigh, Taylor Mali , Foundation for Learning Equality, Arts Ed Matters, and +++) and ample food for thought.

A little bit about our host - the mission of ISKME is to improve the practice of continuous learning, collaboration, and change in the education sector. Champions of innovative teaching and learning practices, we were especially intrigued by their "Action Collabs." Like KIDmob workshops, Action Collabs are dynamic, hands-on workshops that have at their foundation a framework of design thinking. It is always fascinating to us to observe the ways in which folks define and use the design process, as it is just a little bit different with each group. Through the observation of other translations of this process, we are continually able to question and improve our own. Additionally, an OUTSTANDING resource that ISKME provides is the OER (Open Educational Resource) Commons. Educators, we are looking at you! If you need curriculum support, this is the place for you to go for free learning and teaching content, crowd sourced, common core aligned, and quality controlled from worldwide submissions. Check it out, and contribute! We will keep you updated as KIDmob contributes workshop curricula to the OER Commons as well. 

Thanks again to the ISKME team and all of the folks who made this such a memorable gathering. This year, because of you, KIDmob is planning a trip down to High Tech High to see the magic in action and visit some new teacher friends, tackling our workshops with a more informed sense of teacher's needs regarding Common Core State Standards, and enjoying Sunday brunches at our Bay Area neighbor's (WikiSeat Founder) West Oakland digs (they have ducks!).

See you at Big Ideas Fest 2014!

GIRL'S MIDDLE SCHOOL MOBBED!

Happy Halloween, everyone!  KIDmob recently wrapped up an inspiring workshop with the Girl's Middle School. We had an incredible week working with the girls to develop design proposals for an on-site, indoor "Elevated Structure." The project brief was determined by GMS faculty liaisons in response to a campus desire for a creative concept push for an existing corridor lounge space. With 13' ceilings and a more than adequate spatial footprint, the idea of an indoor treehouse was brought up = AWESOME. Currently, the site is already being used for a variety of activities: group Minecraft sessions, solo book immersion, homework, practicing theater lines to impromptu audiences....Needless to say, the space's user base was already pretty solid. We spent the week going through our design methodology with the students - starting with some hands-on model making (building skills), looking at precedents and other forms of inspiration, speaking with "clients" in order to develop a thorough understanding of stakeholder needs, analyzing the site, (defining the challenge / communication / critical observation), brainstorming, sketching, writing, modeling, discussing (communication / developing ideas), finalizing materials for project proposals (implementing ideas), presenting final projects to "clients" and listening to their feedback (communication / evaluating ideas), and of course, working through a few spontaneous "wild card" moments. Next steps, figure out logistics for phase two so that those incredible ideas can get put into wood, metal, and....beaded curtains? Stay tuned! 

PASSEPORT EVENT!

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FEATURE FILM IN THE WORKS

The talented filmmaker Clare Major has begun the year-long filming process for a new independent feature focusing on KIDmob's development as an organization as well as our Haiti and Greenville partnerships. We are super stoked to have her intelligent and insightful self around all of the time (even if she is usually behind a camera or trying to stick microphones down our shirts), and are looking forward to the year ahead. So excited to have you with us, Clare! Read more about Clare below:

"My work as a documentary filmmaker and video journalist has included projects for the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Discovery Channel, and many other media outlets, private companies, and independent documentaries. I have worked on videos that have been part of a Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times explanatory reporting package, won two College Television Awards (a.k.a. Student Emmys), and been a Student Academy Awards national finalist.

I love that my job is to become a serial expert on interesting people doing interesting things, all over the world. I’ve shot in Spain, Switzerland, Senegal, Liberia, Azerbaijan, the Philippines, and all around the USA.

A graduate of UT Austin’s Radio-TV-Film department and of the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism’s documentary program, I have been freelancing in the San Francisco Bay Area since 2007.

From 2004 to 2006, I served as a Peace Corps sustainable agriculture volunteer in Senegal, West Africa, where I worked with farmers and my host village women’s group to improve crop production and generate income. I returned in 2009 to shoot my graduate thesis film, Feast & Sacrifice.

A native of Baton Rouge, Louisiana, I don’t have much of a Southern accent, but I do say 'y’all.'” 

EXPLORATORIUM'S XTECH MOBBED

KIDmob recently partnered with the XTech team to co-create another fun-filled workshop intensive. XTech defined their community need: a redesign of the existing outreach exhibitions deployed at various partner communities. Currently, a series of activities exploring concepts like gravity or the color of pigment are taken to sites such as The Boys and Girls Club and the UCSF children's patient rooms. These activities, and how they break down, expand, transport, and are interfaced, became the design challenge focus. Dubbing our workshop "Deployable Structures," we spent three days facilitating student teams through the design process for our in-house 'clients,' the Exploratorium outreach coordinators. What a blast! XTech Students hit the ground running with an entire day devoted to skill building. They explored project-relevant concepts through a range of mediums including architectural drafting, hand modeling, and 3d digital modeling, before jumping right into the design process. On the third day, student teams presented their process, proposals, and full-scale prototypes to all of the project stakeholders, receiving feedback and suggestions, before diving into a table full of cupcakes. (WILL DESIGN FOR CUPCAKES should be a bumper sticker). A great success, and lots of in-house interest for further iterations and final implementation. Go XTech Students!

Big thanks to our partner organization, XTech, and their incredible teachers: Denny Tsang and Alex Toy, the amazing students, as well as all of the participating Exploratorium staff. Additionally, shout outs to the KIDmob "mob" -  Sara Olsen, Sam Bertain, Ashwin Biln, Taylor Fulton, Myoung Kang, Chris Vandenbrink, Kate Ganim, Tyler Pew, Kadi Franson, and Sally Yee, what a fabulous team!

KIDMOB WRAPS UP FRIENDSHIP MONTH

This July, KIDmob kicked off an annual outreach campaign called Friendship Month, geared towards developing a stronger local design education network. We sought out school programs, hackerspaces, educators, thinkers, administrators, and innovators in order to directly engage the discussion of design in K12 education with like-minded folks outside of our organization. Through this effort, we developed new collaborations, shared curriculum insights, garnered support, and made friends! 

Some highlights of the month: Touring the Stanford d.school with City X Project Director, Libby Falck, hanging out with Kim Saxe at Nueva School's incredible campus, and visiting Camp Galileo in action with Head of Curriculum Pamela Brisk. Shoutouts to everyone that so generously gave us their time this month. It was an incredible, inspiring, and informative experience, thank you!

KIDMOB PARTNERS WITH ARCH

We are super excited to announce our new partnership with ARCH, San Francisco's most awesome independent drafting supplies retailer. Lucky for us, ARCH is practically neighbors with the California College of the Arts, so the KIDmob team had plenty of time to get to know everyone during our years at architecture school. The friendly folks at ARCH have agreed to donate materials to us on a monthly basis, to help cover our workshop needs. If you are ever in the Potrero Hill area and want to pet an aloof prince of a pug or drool over .005 micron pens, this is your place. Thanks a million, ARCH!

I AM A FUZZY RED POMPOM

KIDmob's first bi-annual open house event was a success! We started the night off with a colorful intro game that got people making and laughing (we used this during our last workshop with some deviations and it was a hit). Using a fun "bag of tricks" - hodgepodge pile of interesting and potentially antiquated craft supplies from a liquidation sale, folks translated five words or phrases describing themselves into a headpiece. Taffeta top hats, cottony bearded chinstraps, glittering appendages, curls, coils, and corkscrews abounded. Some of the descriptors scrawled onto individual post it notes included: "mother hen," "irreverent," "tall," "random," "cozy," "willing and able," "sleepy night owl," and "pizza." Adequately adorned, we were ready to begin talking KIDmob and inviting people to plug into future and ongoing endeavors: workshops, materials acquisition teams, and through the KIDmob "Lab," our new play space for all efforts that don't neatly fit into the 'middle school workshop' box, like 3D printed prosthetics. Big thanks to CCA for hosting, especially Judy Krasnick, and all the people who showed up to have fun, eat pizza, and talk 'shops!

PROSTHETIC HAND COMPLETE

Here's an image of the completed prosthetic hand - it was brought to an outing hosted by Helping Hands, a support group for children with upper limb differences, this past weekend. It raised a lot of interest for a potential future workshop! Thanks to Ky for finishing the assembly!

EXPERIMENTING WITH 3D PRINTED PROSTHETICS!

Tomorrow we're going to start experimenting with 3D printed prosthetics. We will be playing with the open source file for "Robohand," generously made available by Richard Van As and Ivan Owen. Our hope is to modify the design for a future workshop, to collaborate with kids who were born without fully developed hands and their siblings. We are grateful for the help and input of mechanical engineer Ky Krieger, who specializes in prosthetics and exoskeletons. If we can make this project feasible for a workshop, its potential is quite compelling: ownership and identifications of self, engineering and 3D printing technology, collaboration, empathy, the iterative process,  and creative problem solving. First steps first: build the prosthetic hand.

IDSA DESIGN LEARNING CHALLENGE

​KIDmob recently submitted to the IDSA Design Learning Challenge, receiving an honorable mention for our work with Indian Valley Academy during the "Makerspace" workshop. The challenge is an annual nationwide event that catalyzes design in K12 classrooms. We are excited to read about all of the submitted experiences, great work everyone! Read more about the winners' projects here.

From their website: 

"The primary purpose of the Industrial Designers Society of America's Design Learning Challenge is to expose young students to design thinking and create an active awareness of the discipline of industrial design as a career option before students leave high school. Regardless of career choice, the potential life skills gained by understanding the design process alone offers value. The 2013 Design Teams are challenged to tackle a problem worth solving within their classrooms, schools, neighborhoods, or communities - the goal, is to create innovative outcomes that have positive impact."

KIDMOB GAINS TRACTION

We've just finished up another incredible workshop with Indian Valley Academy. We truly 'mobbed' the campus this time - caravanning in with a team of eleven architects, contractors, artists, and fabricators and psyching up the students to transform the campus into a living culture of creativity. What an energizing experience! Right on time, too, as we gear up for the next few months: more workshops, in Greenville, Haiti, and San Francisco, partnering with CCA's Social Business Ventures class to develop our model, chasing funding, and growing our fabulous network of facilitators and partners. 

SOCIAL BUSINESS VENTURES COLLABORATION

​We are excited to have created another new partnership with the California College of the Arts, this time with the MBA Department. We are working with the Social Business Ventures class to continue to iterate our business model. Looking forward to a summer of strategizing positive growth!

SCRAP OUT LAUNCH A SUCCESS!

KIDmob, in collaboration with CCA, recently conducted the first official “Scrap Out,” a new program on campus aimed at diverting usable materials from the waste stream to KIDmob workshops. The Scrap Out event consisted of four days of getting the word out to CCA students, dumpster-diving, receiving student and staff contributions, stockpiling materials into a big red truck, and hauling it all to our storage space on Treasure Island to be used at future workshops. We are so stoked that with the help of eight KIDmob volunteers along with our CCA collaborators, we were able to offset three dumpsters worth of materials! 

During KIDmob workshops, students iterate through multiple mediums (much like in studio or in practice), in order to develop strong design proposals. The materials that we have used in the past include: paper, cardboard, panels of plywood, modelmaking wood, and found objects for collage: everything from fuzzy pom poms to old hair rollers (ew!).

KIDmob is excited to be a part the sustainability consciousness that is woven into campus culture at CCA. Along with other student and alumni-driven non profit efforts such as Blue Marble Movement, we are grateful to work towards developing this mutually beneficial relationship in the future.

The Scrap Out was made possible through close collaboration between KIDmob and CCA, in particular: the shop staff (especially Jo and Amy), Alex Vikmanis, Lia Wilson and her flyer crew, Jen Sikora, David Meckel, Noah Bartlett, the Blue Marble Movement team, all of our awesome volunteers, and the students of CCA’s San Francisco campus. Thank you!

INTERNSHIP HOURS FOR CO-FACILITATORS

We are super excited to now be able to offer college internship hours for our design student Facilitators! We have also been working with NCARB in order to ensure that hours spent with KIDmob are eligible for the Internship Development Program. ​Yay!