LIBRARY UPDATE: “Fern Waters Kickoff Event”

Yesterday was the kickoff to the Switch + Fern Waters Public Charter Design Thinking Challenge partnership. The Salmon Public Library acting as an extended classroom offered up it’s thinking lab as home base for the 8th grade class to begin a Spring semester journey where they’ll go through Empathy, Define, Ideate, Prototype & Test phases of the design process in order to solve a problem within their new school.

To jump start this event we put them right to the test. They worked in teams as hypothetical contractors to design a piece of art that would go on the side of the McPherson’s building. Their challenge was to make sure that the art represented the communities future vision of Salmon.

They took off into the library to interview different viewpoints getting to know Salmon’s community members a little more intimately. From there it was discussing, brainstorming, and finally prototyping one design to present on at the end of the time allotted.

The good news is they’ll have several months to work on their partnership project with the library, but for now they definitely jumped right into the deep end and proved they were ALL strong swimmers.

Thanks so much to the Steele Reese Foundation, Idaho STEM Action Center, Idaho National Laboratories, and the wonderful local supporters in Salmon who continue to help support efforts like these.