The Problem

Create a thorough, flexible program to teach middle/high school girls design

My Role

Initially brought on as the sole Creative Advisor, I also became a co-facilitator working with girls in the classroom. With the help of the team, I led a redesign of the program structure.

Research

To develop a flexible program, I needed to understand a few things, some of which were also learned in the classroom:

• How does htm.elle facilitate the program?

• What are the age ranges for the girls and what are their motivations?

• What may be the community girls are coming from? How can we relate to them?

Insights

• Keep the language simple

• Challenge the girls, but don’t make concepts out of reach

• Allow girls to learn by doing

• Make it easy to understand how all the topics relate

• Allow girls to choose their own topic, or pick from local topics suggested by the partnered school

How Might We create in inclusive, accessible program for motivated girls to learn how to run a start-up?

Concept

While the pilot program conducted in Summer of 2019 was effective, I found a gap in the shift between topics: design, engineering, and cognitive science. Instead of learning topics individually, I asked how we can extract the similarities of each topic to teach more holistically. Through the development of this idea, I created a new structure for the program that was based on the appropriate blend of information in a Design Thinking process.

The team and I worked through lesson plans to discuss the natural flow of information and how topics would blend together while providing hands-on experience to practice learned skills.

Challenges

The first test of the revised program was on a group of talented girls from a school in Oakland. Unfortunately, as myself and the other co-facilitator discovered over the course of the program, the priorities of the girls were not aligned with the anticipations the non-profit was leading with. With the new need of shifting our program to align with the girls while the program was already in motion, we faced a challenging road ahead.

• the girls are motivated to learn, but they have so many extracurriculars, jobs, and other commitments that homework wasn’t being completed

• many of the girls have English as the second language, so even the simplified English used, was sometimes too complicated

• due to other commitments (jobs, church, sports, and teacher office hours), we had to revise our attendance policy, so teaching with varying attendance made it difficult to keep moving forward

Solution

Although the girls viewed the program as a fun learning experience, we ended up shifting from in-person to online classes to allow students the flexibility of work, sports, church, and teacher office hours. While the solution was not the best, we made the most of it. Girls were able to take the class at their own pace, reach out for help, and present their work through a web-design lesson to build their own portfolio site!