Community Issues is an exciting 9-week introduction course that focuses on solving community problems through design and product creation. The 7th grade students use the design engineering process throughout the class and gain an understanding of how technology and design impacts our daily lives. We encourage collaboration, communication, and creation.
Some class projects include building a cardboard arcade, designing a digital gift basket to solve an imaginary customer's daily frustrations, studying the failures of companies to determine where they messed up on the design engineering process, and finally coding an app including filming a pitch video. The final project has the students determine a need in the community and use data collection through observations and surveys to design a solution using technology. Then they use the design process to create a unique solution to authentic problems. Students will also use Thunkable: a block based coding platform to build an original app.
Technovation:
Technovation offers girls around the world the opportunity to learn the necessary skills to become tech entrepreneurs and leaders. Girls ages 10 to 18 learn to identify a problem in their community and create a mobile app solution to address that problem, and then learn how to communicate these ideas and translate them into a fully launched business. It is supported by Code Savvy, a not-for-profit organization located in Minnesota, dedicated to inspiring and enabling kids, teens and adults to become code-savvy -- to understand the kind of creative thinking that goes into coding, and to try out programming computers and devices. Technovation is committed to bring more diversity -- gender and ethnic diversity -- to the coding profession and to computer science, because creative problem-solving relies on diverse backgrounds and viewpoints.
Central Public Schools offers the Technovation program starting in January of each year and runs through April with the regional event taking place in Minneapolis the first part of May. There will be an informational meeting for families interested in November for the 2021-22 school year.
