[MUSIC] So this video is part of our design thinking and action series. And here we are interviewing Mr. Ron Duncan, who is an educator in the U of I extension who manages our partner project on Illinois Marketplace and Maker Literacy. And here has been using the curriculum developed in the CityX Project to work with kids of all ages and explore how the design thinking process and 3D printing can come together to encourage or motivate children on finding innovative solutions to problems. So join us as we chat with Ron. >> My name is Ron Duncan. I'm a Community and Economic Development Specialist with the University of Illinois Extension Service. And I'm currently working under the Illinois Maker and Marketplace Literacy Project out of the School of Business at the University of Illinois. The CityX Project was a secondary opportunity for us in our Illinois Community Marketplace and Maker Literacy Project. That program was specifically geared for adult or young adult audiences, if you were from ages 16 on up. But we were looking for something that could help us reach into that younger age group, something that would be appropriate but that also could allow us to use many of the same tools and skill development attributes that we were looking for in IMMLP in this younger audience. And we found the really cool CityX Project and really got into the six step design process, basically the Stanford model. Really thought it would be appropriate for our audiences. We've done CityX now, probably more than 15 times with age groups as young as 9 years old and again, youth as old as 15. And it found a very broad range acceptance of the premises and have seen some really, really good work from our young people come out of that project. [SOUND] The CityX Project starts with a premise that there's a group of individuals that have left the planet. They're colonizing a new world. And once they arrive at this new world, they obviously run into difficulties and problems, and have actually phoned home, if you will, to solicit some help from the citizens of Earth on how to solve their problem. Now it just so happens those citizens of Earth are actually the young people that we have working in the class. So these some 45 different problem scenarios they have are brought to bear for the use to look at it. And our process is we actually let them select a project or a problem and an individual that's associated with that problem to work on. They take those problems and then we start introducing the six design element steps, which of course the first one is empathy. The idea there is that we look for the deeper problem. Someone may say they're just hungry. Well, is the answer to that, you just need to go eat? Or is the answer to that, there's not enough food for you? Or is the deeper answer to that, there's not enough food for everyone? The program allows them to explore that deeper why. It also then connects up with a larger sociological issue to see if the problem that the youth are exploring or have picked actually has broader implications across the whole society. And obviously in almost every case they do, so they're allowed to pick that. Then we go into the definition of the problem. What really is the problem? What might the possible elements of that problem be? From that point, obviously it would go into some elements of ideation, where they're thinking sort of broad range, out of the box, about solution sets. And one of the things I really appreciate about CityX is the idea that right off the bat in the manual that they give facilitators, there is no bad idea. Adults really can't help, they have some very, very limiting priorities. They're about we can't have robots do this or do that. But the field is wide open for youth just to explore their own creativity and own ideas. So within that ideation phase, a lot of issues bubble up. And again, as a facilitator one thing that's really important is to make sure that you give them freedom to express that. And now matter how outlandish or wild the idea might sound initially, the real premise here is to get those ideas out. Then there's the process of sort of windowing down. They do some ideation and try to arrive at a more or less a final thought or final design or final solution to the problem. And there we work with them to try to prototype that. That prototyping takes basically two forms. Number one, we almost always try to give them some tactile material to work with, whether that's clay, it could be a building blocks or something. We want them to just make a physical representation of the base of their idea. From that ideation and prototyping part, then we allow them to go into the design software that we use. Tinker Cat is the tool of our choice. And then we let them replicate that idea, once they have the physicality of it, into the software. Once they have it into the software, then is where we ask them to start working on actually testing their ideas, making sure they're going to work. And this is where our 3D printing process that we utilize here is so, so very important because they can get a much more refined view of their idea with the 3D printer. And obviously, they can iterate very quickly by utilizing the 3D printer. And it's just fascinating to see how really mesmerized ten year olds get when they realize that they can online create something in a visual or virtual environment in the program and then actually see a tactile physical piece come out of the 3D printer. That is hugely important in terms of their, if you will, closing the loop around the idea of build, design, test, iterate. Next iteration, build, design, prototype, test, iterate, next design and on and on and on. And finally, I think one of the most important things, again this is back to the, if you will, the Stanford model. The last part of that would be the fact of the sharing aspect of it. It's just super important and we find a lot of our young people really grasp on to that idea about if you got a solution to the problem, they really do need to be able to show that problem to the wider audience. And it's great to see what a great take rate that those young people have around sharing that idea for the larger audience. [SOUND] We've worked from age groups as young as nine years old- >> Okay. >> which would be equivalent to fourth grade here in North America, all the way up to juniors in high school, which would be in the 15 or 16 year old age group. And originally we thought at the older age group we might have a little bit of problem with them buying into the, if you will, the reality of the scenario. But once they got a glimpse of some of the problems, very quickly they got focused on that problem and that individual who had that problem. And so the plausibility of the scenario as a whole really didn't factor in. [SOUND] Yeah, there's a vast difference. One of the best allegories I can probably make for you there is how difficult it is once we start this process within a classroom setting. Quite frankly, how difficult it is to get the young people to disengage from it. >> Okay. >> We always run out of time. >> Okay. >> They always want to do one more change, one more adaptation. Hey, we just thought about it, we've got a better idea. Another thing that's really interesting is that we let the youth work in small teams. Although it's designed in Quirk, it could be done on an individualized basis. We actually think there's value in creating team level work within the CityX exercise. Because again, there are some values that we can hone in on there as well, in terms of working together, finding who's best at what, and letting them explore that capacity. Within the team development I was trying to solve the problem. The interesting thing is that we find there's shared learning team to team to team. So that from the time we start and one team explains their solution, we give them a chance to get up and actually show their results, show what they built, explain why they got to that idea. By the time we go around the room with maybe eight or ten of those solution sets, by the time we get back to where we started, those young people have already looked at everybody else and said, you know we can incorporate what team three did Into our work, and it would make our product even better. So those are some of those collective and group learnings that take place here, that I think are really impactful, really make a difference in young people understanding the fact, that yeah we really need to iterate, get the best idea out there, and if somebody else has got one that will work for us, let's incorporate it into what we're doing. One of the most memorable efforts that I think we did is, one of the problems they were faced with is, that the CItyX colony was faced with meteorites and asteroids. One of our groups created this very, very intricate levitation device, as they called it, that they would levitate a ball or a projectile instead of shooting it, like with a gun or something. They would levitate this to the point where it would actually interact or intercept any meteor that was coming in. I thought that was incredibly advanced thinking in terms of design around that particular thing. One other device that I saw made which was very cool was one of the other scenarios in CityX project is the sun shines too much, it's really bright, we get sunburned really easily. And so the young people were inquiring to me, well what's the planet like that they're on, can you explain it? And I said, well just assume for sake of discussion, that it was Mars. If it was Mars, what would your solution be? And they came up with this incredibly intricate solution about actually creating greenhouses that would heat the soil, drive the frozen moisture out of the soil up into the atmosphere. And then the atmosphere then, it obviously, it would condense and create clouds and shade the thing. And it showed just an incredible connectivity between the physicality and physical relationships of materials, matter, a physics, meteorology, hydrology around trying to create a solution to solve that problem. And so that was just incredibly impressive to me that they'd be willing to do that and to go to that depth. [SOUND] It's hardwork but it's the best two days I spend usually when I have just working with the energetic 12 year olds. I mean really, it's really cool to be able to see their ideas, what they think and how they approach the process. And again I wouldn't that's why I like the guidance that the Stanford model gives because I really think that it's a very appropriate approach. The fact that it just starts with an idea, that greater understanding, the deeper why about being empathic, that ends up with sharing your results is really cool and fits, really does fit the mold of many of our young people today. [MUSIC]
