Samsung 'Safety Truck' Makes It Easier For Drivers To See The Road Ahead Before Trying To Pass

It’s as simple as that: a wireless camera attached to the front of the truck, films the oncoming traffic, and sends the image to a video wall made out of four exterior monitors located on the back.

This way, the driver stuck behind the vehicle can have a better understanding of whether is safe to overtake or not.

A brilliant idea that seems obvious in retrospect: thing is, nobody had ever tested something similar to what Asian technology behemoth Samsung has been experimenting with recently.

If implemented, the system could be a game-changer. A pilot test was run in Argentina, one of the countries with the most dangerous roads in the world, with 12.4 road fatalities per 100,000 inhabitants per year, according to the 2014 editionof the Road Safety Annual Report.

Most of these accidents occur on two-lane roads and particularly in situations of overtaking; so this kind of technology could indeed prove something of a boon for drivers.

“Another advantage of the Safety Truck,” the Korean manufacturer writes in a post on Samsung Tomorrow (the Samsung Electronics official global blog), “is that it may reduce the risk of accidents caused by sudden braking or animals crossing the road.”

There’s even a night vision mode to allow the system to be fully functional after sunset.It’s worth considering, though, whether staring at a screen at night time could be a good thing or not. Could it actually be a source of distraction, with the system ending up causing more problems than it actually proposes to solve? And what kind of effect could such an intense light have on the driver’s eyes?

Another possible issue: what would happen, in case of bad weather, to the screens, or to the camera on the front bumper. Would they still be reliable?

For better or worse, anyway, for now the ‘safety truck’ is just a brilliant concept: the one tested in Argentina was simply a prototype, enough to confirm that the technology actually works, and it’s no longer operational.

The next step, the company says, is to perform the “corresponding tests in order to comply with the existing national protocols and obtain the necessary permits and approvals.”

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Single-cell breakthroughs let scientists see exactly what we’re all made of 07-05

Single-cell breakthroughs let scientists see exactly what we’re all made of

In Israel for Broad Institute conference, Eric Lander, pioneer of Human Genome Project, marvels at speed with which ‘new genomics’ opens ways to fight disease

Two years ago, when mathematician and biologist Eric Lander was in Israel for an innovative gathering of researchers and students, he took a break from his conference to describe to The Times of Israel how scientists had completed the sequencing of the human genome — a person’s “parts list” — and were now working on the “wiring diagram,” setting out how those parts work together.


Back in Israel recently for the third of his Broad Institute’s annual conferences, Lander enthused over the “amazing” pace at which science has moved on since that last visit, most especially in the study of single cells — what he called “the new genomics.”


One of the founding fathers of the Human Genome Project, Lander has dedicated his work to understanding what makes us tick, the better to keep us ticking. To underline the significance of this work for all of us, I headlined my 2013 interview with him, “This man’s work will change your life.” What’s unfolded in the last two years, he said, is a growing ability to identify what we humans are made of at the most fundamental level — the level of a single cell — with extraordinary potential benefits for understanding, observing and treating the diseases that afflict us.

Lander, 58, is the founding director of the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT, which is devoted to utilizing human genome research in medicine. He was back in Israel for the “Third Annual Broad-Israel Science Foundation (ISF) Cell Circuits Symposium” — which brought together experts and students from the Broad Institute, from Harvard, and from Israel’s universities, on the cutting edge of human genome research and its applications for medicine.

Capitalizing on an Israeli scientific community that is very strong when it comes to combining biology and info-technology skills, the Broad-Israel partnership encourages Israeli and American trailblazing in an increasing number of joint projects, all designed to speed our progress toward thwarting cancers, Alzheimer’s, diabetes and other diseases.

Explaining the rapid advances in single-cell research, Lander said that as recently as two years ago, scientists had only what you might consider “a pixelated, low-resolution image” of our cell structure. They really didn’t know how many different types of cells there are in the body, and they couldn’t identify the differences between them.

“In the past we had a kind of blended big picture, a ‘smoothie,'” said Lander, finding another metaphor to enlighten this non-expert. “Now, because of new laboratory techniques and maths and advances in DNA sequencing,” he went on, “we have the ability to study single cells. Folks spent 40 years working to identify the cells of the retina, the back of an eye,” he said by way of an example. “Now you can do that in an afternoon.”

And why should we care? Because, Lander positively sparkled, “the ability to do single-cell analysis, to get the identities and states of each of the cells, is the final revolution in this field. It’s the equivalent of an amazing new microscope” — a microscope that offers remarkable potential for improving our health.

Human cancer cells with nuclei (specifically the DNA) stained blue. The central and rightmost cell are in interphase, so the entire nuclei are labeled. The cell on the left is going through mitosis and its DNA has condensed.  (TenOfAllTrades/Wikipedia)
Human cancer cells with nuclei (specifically the DNA) stained blue. The central and rightmost cell are in interphase, so the entire nuclei are labeled. The cell on the left is going through mitosis and its DNA has condensed. (TenOfAllTrades/Wikipedia)

For instance? In the old days — that is, until a couple of years ago — scientists struggled to understand what constituted a tumor. What common genetic features do tumors have? How might tumors be tackled most effectively? “Now we can see the commonality, the types of cells, the proportions, the logic,” he said. “This has major implications for our health.

“You want to kill a tumor? Well, maybe our treatments work on one type of cell. We were blind to that. Now we can test a treatment on the few different types of cells.”

The new microscope, in other words, enables an unprecedentedly precise understanding of disease. “It tells us what we need to solve.”

‘The ability to do single cell analysis, to get the identities and states of each of the cells, is the final revolution in this field. It’s the equivalent of an amazing new microscope’

“Imagine medicine before gross anatomy,” Lander suggested, as he sought to put the dramatic recent progress into historical perspective. “Then comes anatomy, and you can describe the organs of the body. You can see something problematic, say, in the lung, or in the heart. Well, this is the ultimate anatomy. It will penetrate every type of medicine. Not bad for two years. This just didn’t exist last time we spoke.”

Another area of rapid progress cited by Lander is the ability to “precisely edit” the genome of human cells, which has massive potential to help treat certain diseases. Just two years ago, Feng Zhang, a researcher at the Broad, invented this power gene-editing technology by harnessing by harnessing — called CRISPR-Cas9 — that can cut genomes in any place and thus enable editing.

Already an Israeli researcher at Broad has published a paper “editing” each of the 20,000 genes to find those that are essential to particular types of cancer cells – in effect, identifying the Achilles Heels of these cancers.

These advances also might open up possibilities of altering the human gene pool, of working to create less-diseased humans, even super-humans. “There’s talk of editing the DNA of embryos to alter our gene pool,” he acknowledged. “It’s being discussed.”

Then he added dryly, “I’m not sure it’s a good idea. Eugenics hasn’t worked out too well for society. Moreover, changing DNA for one purpose can have unexpected bad consequences.”

Where the advances are clearly positive is in the capacity — as genetic mapping becomes more affordable and more sophisticated — to identify the genes that predispose to Alzheimer’s, early onset cancer and many other diseases. (A personal genome map now costs about $3,000, he said.)

In some cases, genetic information can be important to parents. “Today, doctors can check two folks getting married for some mutations that would cause a disease if it was inherited by their children. In the future you would do checks for more.”

The partnership between Broad and Israel, Lander stressed, works particularly well because of Israel’s strong information technology and bio-science communities. “Israel is such an intersection of those skill sets,” he said.

And Israel’s ever-strained public health system, he added, actually has very good electronic medical records — “a 20-year history,” he said — which makes it well-placed to utilize new advances as they become available. “In the next decade we’ll collect a lot of information, and we’ll figure out the best uses. We’ll assess the risks of disease, the possibility to intervene.”


For all of that, you need groundbreaking scientists and good data. Like the United States, said Lander, Israel has both.

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The Modi government is ready with a memorial for late Indian Prime Minister PV Narasimha Rao at New Delhi’s Ekta Sthal 07-03

Reinstating Narasimha Rao

History has a way of doing justice that is often as unpredictable as it is illuminating. The Modi government is ready with a memorial for late Indian Prime Minister PV Narasimha Rao at New Delhi’s Ekta Sthal Samadhi Complex, a common place for erecting memorials for former presidents, Prime Ministers and others, with the approval of the Union Cabinet. Ten years after his demise, Rao has finally got a memorial in his name in the national capital. This move may be aimed at embarrassing the Congress party, but it does justice to the legacy of one of India’s finest Prime Ministers. A party that prays at the altar of the dynasty can never appreciate how far-reaching Rao’s accomplishments were.

Ironically, this news comes weeks after the charging of former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh with corruption and criminal conspiracy for his alleged role in the scandal over the sale of coal fields. Singh has been built up by the Congress party over the years as the real architect of economic reforms in an effort to marginalise Rao. In his last 10 years as Prime Minister, Singh himself hardly found time to acknowledge Rao’s contributions to India. In fact, he hardly reacted when Rao’s body was not even allowed to be taken inside the All India Congress Committee building after his death in 2004 as the Congress party tried its best to deprive Rao of all the credit that should have been his due as the nation’s Prime Minister at one of the most difficult times in its contemporary history.

The early 1990s was a time when a succession of weak governments had left India rudderless — economically, politically and strategically. The world was changing rapidly and the Indian economy was collapsing. India was facing a million mutinies and there was no one of national stature to stem the tide. The Mandal-Mandir discourse and the controversies surrounding caste reservations and Ayodhya were threatening to take the country apart. It was at such a juncture that Rao assumed power. He had scant support from the senior party leadership of his own party, all of whom had their own aspirations to become Prime Minister.

Despite the caricature of Rao being indecisive, he was one of the most decisive leaders this nation has seen. On all crucial issues, he took decisions that have continued to shape India’s rise over the last two decades.

Manmohan Singh may be touted as the father of Indian economic reforms, but it was Rao who fathered the process. Singh was an economic technocrat with little understanding of political constraints and hardly any ability to navigate them. It was Rao who shielded Singh from the left wing of his own party, a flank that left no stone unturned in opposing the economic liberalisation programme.

Rao made economic reforms politically tenable at a time when his own party was out to scuttle his most ambitious project. He effectively linked economic policy with foreign policy as he reached out to the US, recognising that India would need the support of the West if economic reforms were to succeed.

His imprimatur is everywhere in Indian foreign policy today: Delhi’s subtle balancing act in the Middle East; trying to establish a stable balance with China; the outreach to East and Southeast Asia as part of India’s “Look East” policy; and helping India achieve enough economic heft to withstand sanctions after the NDA conducted Pokharan-II. In the Middle East, Rao had courage no other Indian leader has displayed. He established full diplomatic ties with Israel in 1992 even as he reached out to Iran, paying a landmark visit to Tehran in 1993 — the first Indian Prime Minister to do so since the 1979 revolution. Rao was also the initiator of the “Look East” policy. He understood early on that the centre of gravity of global economics was shifting to the East and that India’s economic future needed to be linked to the booming economies in East Asia. He expanded India’s engagements with the Association of South East Asian Nations not only as a matter of India’s economic revival, but also as a counterweight to rising Chinese dominance.

On the internal security front under Rao, the Punjab situation improved markedly and the Indian security forces got a handle on the Kashmir insurgency — even as Rao revived that state’s political process. It was therefore distinctly odd the way Manmohan Singh acquiesced in his party’s decimation of Rao’s legacy. It was only in his last years when the Indian economy — Dr Singh’s claim to fame — seemed to be unravelling, that he suddenly remembered the role that Rao had played in making the reforms happen. 

That was when he acknowledged Rao in his last speech from the Red Fort. In his speech, Dr Singh said, “In the year 1991, under the leadership of Shri Narasimha Rao, we successfully negotiated a major economic crisis and embraced reforms for strengthening our economy. These reforms were opposed by many political parties at that time. But the reforms were in national interest and were therefore continued by all governments that came to power subsequently. Since then, the reform process has continually moved forward.”

It was Rao’s sagacious political leadership that sustained the economic reforms programme in the early 1990s. Today, the Congress party’s leadership has little understanding of what’s at stake. Neither Sonia Gandhi nor Rahul Gandhi has shown any leadership on the issue, leaving Singh adrift at a time of global and local economic turmoil. The Congress has, over the years, created this myth that Rao was a closet sympathiser of the Ram Janambhoomi movement. This allowed the party to absolve its rank and file of all the blame and make Rao a convenient scapegoat. It is forgotten that it was Rajiv Gandhi’s government that opened the locks and performed shilanyas (ground-breaking ceremony) at the disputed site. The party may have given Rao the short shrift but there is a new awareness of Rao’s achievements in India today. 

By honouring Rao after his death, the Modi government will be only giving Rao what should have been his due during his lifetime.

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Yashwant Sinha takes dig at PM Narendra Modi for neglecting veterans07-03

Yashwant Sinha takes dig at PM Narendra Modi for neglecting veterans 

"All those who are above the age of 75 were declared brain dead on May 26, 2014," senior BJP leaderYashwant Sinha has said, taking a swipe at Prime Minister Narendra Modi for setting the cut off age of 75 years for induction of ministers.

The caustic take from Sinha, who held finance and external affairs portfolios in the Atal Bihari Vajpayee and Chandra Shekhar governments, on the neglect of BJP veterans came at an industry event yeterday where he was asked about the difference between the Narendra Modi andManmohan Singh dispensations.

Sinha also targeted Modi over his pet 'Make in India' initiative, saying "make India first" and the rest will follow.

"I am among those brain dead," Sinha, whose son Jayant is Union Minister of State for Finance, said.

The octogenarian leader from Jharkhand is among top BJP leaders like L K Advani and Murli Manohar Joshi, who have been sulking after not been inducted into the Modi government. Advani and Joshi have been made members of BJP's 'Margdarshak Mandal" to mentor the party. Joshi had recently targeted Modi's 'Namami Gange' project for cleaning the Ganga, claiming it will never be successful.

Recalling his days as Finance Minister to take a swipe at the 'Make in India' initiative, Sinha said he had lowered duty on heavy equipment used for building roads. That, he said, accelerated construction of highways and helped the economy.

"'Make India' and 'Make in India' will follow," he said.

Before Yashwant Sinha, Modi had come in for criticism for fixing the cut off age for ministers from another party senior-- actor-turned-politician Shatrughan Sinha.

Shatrughan Sinha, who had also served as Union minister under Vajpayee, insisted on "merit and mental alertness" being the criteria for choosing ministers.

"Instead of age, the criteria shall be mental alertness and health. Even at an age of 87 L K Advani has a sharp memory and energy like a 40-year-old man. Who can question the mental alertness and physical activities of Advani or Murli Manohar Joshi?" Shatrughan, who calls Advani his "guru", had said some time back.

Speaking at an industry meet in Mumbai on Wednesday, former finance minister Yashwant Sinha questioned the government’s claims of economic recovery to be more “statistical” than real.

“We have recovered from the slowdown, at least statistically, if not really, because we have changed the norms,” Sinha said, calling for a debate on the issue and comparable figures of economic growth from previous years which can validate the claims of recovery.

“It cannot be that you prepare one year’s figures and say now you’re doing 7.4 per cent or eight per cent or 20 per cent,” Sinha said. “What are the new norms (of computation)? Even the Chief Economic Advisor of the government of India does not understand this. And we’ve put the same culprits (who initiated the change) to sit in judgement over this change.”

There are “serious issues” in the economy, which have to be addressed and the government can never say it has tackled all the pressing concerns, he said.

Sinha ridiculed the BJP’s decision to sideline those of its leaders who were above 75 years of age. Sinha said the government’s Make in India campaign was insufficient without better infrastructure. He  criticised the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) for keeping interest rates high and called for a better “working alliance” between the finance ministry and the central bank.

But the former civil servant was denied a Lok Sabha ticket in the 2014 elections from Hazaribagh, which went to his son, present Minister of State for Finance Jayant. Neither has he been inducted in any policy-making role in the one year of the new government.

Apart from Sinha, leaders like Murli Manohar Joshi and L K Advani have also felt marginalised in the new scheme of things. Some others like Kalyan Singh have been given gubernatorial assignments. The BJP had then claimed this to be part of the process of generational change in its leadership.

Recently, Joshi had said the ‘Clean Ganga’ campaign of the Modi government was unlikely to be successful. Last week, Advani spoke at length about the possibility of a repeat of the Emergency, which opposition parties interpreted as his criticism of Prime Minister Modi.

Sinha also took a jibe at the government’s flagship ‘Make in India’ campaign, saying energies should be first focused on making the country a better place and all the other things will fall in place. To buttress his point, Sinha cited his decision to lower the duties on heavy road building equipment when he was the finance minister, which ensured that the highway work kick-started, which, he claimed, in turn helped the economy. “Make India and Make in India  will follow,” he said.

Earlier this year, the government had adopted a change in the system of growth computation, which put the country’s economic growth to be among the fastest in the world, even ahead of China. The country grew 7.4 per cent in FY15 under the new system — as against the five per cent levels under the older system in FY14 — and is expected to close in on the 8 per cent mark for FY16.

Sinha also criticised the stance of the RBI in keeping interest rates high, blaming its “measly” cuts for the banks’ reluctance to pass on the benefits of the cumulative 0.75 per cent cut.

D-STEM: Applying design thinking to STEM in academia and industry 07-02

D-STEM: Applying design thinking to STEM in academia and industry

At Inspirefest 2015, the topic of STEM (science, technology, engineering, arts and maths) kept cropping up as technologists, scientists and designers converged on the stage of the Bord Gáis Energy Theatre, Dublin.

This discussion was furthered during a panel on design thinking and its application in both academia and industry, led by Ciarán ÓGaora, founder and director of Zero-G, in association with Irish Design 2015.

In this discussion, IADT director Dr Annie Doona explained how students at the institute are introduced to new perspectives on design and technology, and how a fruitful partnership with IBM has brought separate disciplines together.

Prof Susan Schreibman, national co-ordinator of DARIAH Ireland, is based at Maynooth University and has overseen practical projects working at the intersection of technology and humanities, such as the digitisation of Ireland’s 1901 and 1911 censuses.

Prof Schreibman noted how interdisciplinary work such as has a lot to do with translation, and applying different modes of thinking. ‘Designers as translators’ was a concept introduced by Swrve director Kathryn Parkes, who sees user-centred approaches catching on in business through methodologies like lean start-up.

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The Result of Design Thinking Students Designing Their Own School: EmpathicEducation for a Compassionate Nation 07-01

The Result of Design Thinking Students Designing Their Own School: EmpathicEducation for a CompassionateNation

As a clinical psychologist and forensic expert in special education and gifted, I've specialized in the ends of the bell curve for almost 20 years. Learning about people who are very advanced, and/or very behind in their studies and development led me to reconsider my whole career. In 2011, I founded The Connect Group, a non-profit organization connecting communities with innovative educational solutions. The very next year, I closed my thriving private practice, where I treated professional athletes as an extension of my work with gifted people, to devote myself full-time to transforming education. In my vast research spanning history, politics, psychology, philosophy, neuroscience, mindful awareness, and pedagogy, 

I've found a dearth of empathy and compassion. Most alarming is the absence of empathy and compassion for students and educators who are oppressed by ineffective educational practices. I introduced the concept of Educational Trauma, to explain the inadvertent perpetration and perpetuation of victimization against producers and consumers of educational systems. And, this month, Pedagogies of Kindness and Respect, a textbook for pre-service teachers went to press. It includes a chapter I wrote that explores our students' answer to this problem: EmpathicEducation for a CompassionateNation: A Pedagogy for Kindness and Respect for Healing Educational Trauma.

EmpathicEducation for a CompassionateNation isn't just a theoretical proposition, it is an educational model piloted by The Connect Group in Los Angeles. When we launched the pilot program in May 2014, I wrote about it for Ashoka's Start Empathy blog, and here's how the year went!

A Mobile Learning Community:

To mitigate costs, we used the Lean Start Up model, and relied on free resources in the community. Doing so also demonstrated how radical pop-up learning communities are not only possible, but effective and feasible approaches to education. Our co-founders (students and adults alike) met at libraries, museums, and parks. We went to special events, volunteered at Tree People and at Center for Pacific Asian Families. We took Mindful Nature classes at Insight LA with a mixed age group of students that included a very wide range of adult learners too! It was co-learning in nature, at its very best!

The Forgiving Tree:

Community service is a big component of EmpathicEducation for a CompassionateNation because it cultivates empathy skills while offering effective compassion. Our youngest co-founder, 6-year old Sandy (*name changed for privacy) initiated our biggest community service campaign: The Forgiving Tree. This campaign has 3 focal points of service: The elderly, nature, and recycling. Sandy's first activity for the Forgiving Tree campaign was to create Public Service Announcement posters to encourage recycling. Our students created posters, which were welcomed by our friends at Center for Pacific Asian Families. Could we please just notice that this originated with a 6-year old?!!

Fundraising:

In order to provide students with an authentic experience of starting a Learning Community, we supported their fundraising efforts in acquiring physical education equipment. The fundraising campaign was student led, and they succeeded in reaching their goals. We believe this experience goes beyond traditional school fundraisers because students were involved in the financial affairs, and needed to consider the costs associated with running the fundraiser, the cost of equipment, and how to balance these variables.

A Playful Democratic Learning Community:

Our Learning community is democratic so we followed the lead of students in an effort to nurture their passions, and inspire self-direction and self-responsibility. Our group happens to be quite talented artistically, and as such we provided them with numerous art classes all over Los Angeles. We went on field trips every week, and spent time in nature, hiking local canyons, and visiting the beach. Theatre and improv were a component of the program as well, in an attempt to foster "dramaturgical consciousness," as described by Jeremy Rifkin in The Empathic Civilization. http://empathiccivilization.com/ And, play was supported as the highest form of learning, as inspired by Jean Piaget, who said: "Play is the answer to how anything new comes about." The Connect Group School co-founders played "school design and start up" all year long to see what newness might emerge!

Design Thinking:

We used Mary Cantwell's DEEPdt Design Thinking methodology to create norms, language, and practices for brainstorming, empathizing with students and educators, prototyping, failing-up, and iterating. We used it to explore different school settings, and create the mission and vision statements for our learning community. We even empowered students with Design Thinking skills, which older students embraced on their own and created Design Thinking challenges for other students. One student created a challenge for drought awareness and facilitated it with 200 peers. One challenge resulted in the creation of Individual Learning Plans (ILPs.) The learning plans students prototyped were essentially self-directed courses that allowed them to pursue their interests and passions while documenting the progress. Each student created a separate ILP for each area of study. 

They also reported on their progress 4 times in the school year, by way of a self-reflective assessment called Quarterly Reports. To complete the Quarterly Reports, students reflected upon themselves, upon their work product, their study skills, needs, concerns, problems, and they also looked forward to the next quarter and established goals. This serves as a major shift from the empathic failure that is grading and report cards to empathy for students by putting the power of assessment in their hands. Doesn't it often feel better to simply notice something needs fixing yourself, than to be shamed for putting forth an effort that doesn't match someone else's expectations of you?

Kindness & Respect:

The values promoted at The Connect Group School are a main focus of dialogue with student co-founders. We believe kindness, respect, empathy, and compassion are essential qualities for all people, and foundational to happiness, collaboration, creativity, innovation, and any career one may choose. To promote it, we use Marshall Rosenberg's Non-Violent Communication to train students and educators in how to communicate with respect for one another's feelings, needs, experiences, and observations. Former Major League Baseball player, Tony Scruggs serves as my personal role model for this form of communication. He inspires me to make this a critical part of our students' experience because it is how we share kindness, respect, empathy, and compassion with others.

Challenges:

Students suffering from Educational Trauma are attracted to this educational model, yet unable to build a learning community because of the trauma. This created a dilemma in how to serve needs of the community, while simultaneously creating the Learning Community. As such, we had to become very selective about which students and families would be a good fit for co-founding a Learning Community, while simultaneously educating students. This was particularly challenging, and sad, because it meant we had to turn students away that desperately needed EmpathicEducation. Additionally, the language for democratic, student-centered learning that follows pedagogies of kindness, respect, and vulnerability has not yet reached families educating students. 

As such, it can be difficult for parents to understand why and how this model is beneficial to students. We currently live in a state of historical amnesia, forgetting that research and history confirm that current educational practices are ineffective, even harmful. This purposeful forgetting serves to free individuals from accountability and responsibility, and perpetuates status quo. EmpathicEducation for a CompassionateNation aims to unpack and repair this failure of collective responsibility for one another, and particularly for our children.

Looking ahead:

We had no idea how this pilot program would go this past year, and we still don't know how it will look in the future, which is kind of what life is like for everyone right now! We are excited about the partnerships we've developed in our community, and the collaborations moving forward. What I can tell you is that our students are happier than they've ever been. They are invested in a cause bigger than themselves, for the greater good of all, which makes them feel worthy, important, honored, and respected. Don't we all want a little of that? It's working out pretty well; student co-founders spend some time in the summers at meetings moving EmpathicEdcuation for a CompassionateNation forward. We'll keep you posted.

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Design Thinking Students Co-designing Their Own School 07-01

Design Thinking Students Co-designing Their Own School 

The names of the children mentioned in this article have been changed to protect their privacy.
In order to inspire, motivate, and engage students in the learning experience, it is necessary to look at the world through their eyes. When adults pause and consider the world through from the students' perspective, we begin to examine their authentic needs, instead of the needs imposed upon them. Educational models that value and incorporate student input are emerging as empathic to students' needs.

In May 2014, students at The Connect Group School in Los Angeles, CA, began using design thinking to fashion an educational model that meets their needs, gathering regularly throughout the summer to develop their school from the ground up. On August 25, The Connect Group School will pilot the program their students are designing.

With a foundation of freedom and democracy drawn from the Sudbury Valley School model, the students participate in every aspect of school management. Students are involved in hiring, admissions, policy, and budgetary decisions. Like a true democracy, each participant will have a vote in the matters that impact their academic lives..

Design thinking is a dynamic pedagogy for co-learning that cultivates empathy. It is a multidisciplinary approach to solving human-centered problems and an empowering way of addressing needs and concerns. The modes of design thinking promote inquiry, iteration, and prototyping along with critical thinking, communication, teamwork, and making/tinkering. Empathy is highlighted as a mode of its own, wherein the design-thinker attempts to infiltrate and truly come to understand the needs of the end-user..

The design thinking process begins with discovery, moves to ideation and rapid prototyping, and ends with testing and execution. As an evolving process of learning, sharing, dialoguing, and problem solving, design thinking inspires adults and students to learn together. Without a lesson plan as a guide, neither teacher nor student knows where the process will lead. This bi-directional educational process is one I have termed "co-learning"--a human interaction that leads to learning for all parties. These are critical components of learning, because we all start in a place of not knowing, and can all learn something new about old topics.

Design thinking facilitates empathy by encouraging the designer to turn his or her attention towards another person, particularly the end-user being served by the process. In K-12 classrooms, design thinking allows students and staff to engage in challenges and activities that hone their ability to turn attention toward another person, with the intention of learning about needs and experiences outside their own. Design thinking cultivates empathy by training students in attentional skills and by emphasizing the need to help solve problems affecting other people.

By promoting students to a level equivalent to their teacher counterparts, design thinking challenges offer students power and voice that are very motivating. It's a methodology that respects their input in solving challenges and problems that matter.

Students Speak:

Sixteen-year-old David, one of three student co-founders/co-designers of the Connect Group School, said the following about using design thinking to build his school: "I am engaged and motivated to design think because I get to have choices and participate in solving problems that matter."

Allowing students a hand in designing their education helps them feel like active and valued participants. It's a qualitatively different experience than showing up to school on the first day and passively receiving instruction. The quality of difference lies in empathy. Students of The Connect Group School have choices and power in regards to what happens in their school. Their viewpoints, values, and perspectives matter in all areas of school that they wish to engage in.

David continued, "Design thinking gives you experience empathizing with an end-user, not just yourself."

Another student who is contributing to the development of The Connect Group School is Ryan, a 15-year-old male. Ryan said: "I am engaged and motivated to design- think because it's a method of carrying out whatever I want and need."

Ryan's comment highlights the level of empowerment, freedom, and agency that design thinking offers students. Everyone, regardless of age, wants to feel like they can contribute something meaningful, solve their own problems, and meet their own needs. These are aspects of self-agency that need to be taught to youngsters as evidence that we value them as free and capable people. Ultimately, including young people in every aspect of school design and management conveys to them that they matter. At the heart of empathy lies the value that someone matters and is worth our time to understand, from their perspective. Children deserve to be included in this homage of respect.

Twelve-year-old Jill enjoys design thinking because it allows her to move about. She talked about moving around during design thinking challenges and also about the field trips she has taken in the community to learn more about education. Empathic education recognizes children's deep need for free play as a method of learning. Incidentally, design thinking often feels like play time, because it is messy, unpredictable, and rapidly changing.

In the process of design thinking their new school, the students at The Connect Group School participate in the creation of a learning model that is relevant to them. It inspires them to work in the summer months to consider their wants and needs and those of other K-12 students.

This is how empathy as a skill is cultivated through design thinking in the K-12 arena. Planning one's own educational framework is a wonderful empathy-building tool. It stimulates students' engagement and intrinsic motivation while encouraging them to practice self-empathy in service of empathy for others.

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