My first meeting for my independent project was today. I met Priscilla Bandy who is an interior designer. In order to have a better idea about what I wanted to do for my independent project, I had to meet with her and talk with her about the possible things we could work on together. She is giving me a lot of great opportunities in which I will be able to help her and she will be able to help me. At the same time, I will constantly be learning throughout the work we do. Priscilla and I spoke a lot about what projects we could work on together and she told me that she is currently working on a house in La Planicie in the district of La Molina. The house is almost ready, except for the entrance. This will be an opportunity for me to explore that area and actually design a space that I believe the client will like. Two weeks from today, I will visit the house in La Planicie with her and sketch some ideas, measure the space and do some brainstorming of how this house could be remodeled. I am very excited! I can't wait to finally visit the house but, I am nervous too. I don't know what the space looks like so I can't come up with ideas of what the space can be turned in to. Also, I have never done this before, especially designing something for someone else. Will they like it? Of course, this is just for practice. She may not even use my design or ideas for the final entrance of the house but still, there is a little bit of pressure on me to make this right. For anyone interested in interior design, she told me about an app called Houzz where you can get awesome ideas from. Plus, it is free! This app will help me to think of innovative ideas that could possibly become the entrance of someone's home. |
1 Comment
What a great way to get inspiration for the remodeling of our classroom and how these businesses work in order to achieve something big. We visited two places: Innova Schools and Interbank Innova schools are schools which provide education for children in a more innovative and creative way, with a reasonable price per month for those families with a lower economic status. We visited the school and saw a presentation from the creator of this business. Educación innovadora para construir el futuro de tus hijos Very inspirational! Many of the ideas like the design thinking which we have applied in the Innovation Academy related to what they had in Innova Schools as well as Interbank. "Interbank Explora" is a renewed Interbank. A whole new perspective of how a bank should be. Once you step inside it doesn't feel like a bank at all. You could even think this was a coffee shop. But they thought about EVERY SINGLE DETAIL, never gave up and months later after the opening of the bank, changes and improvements are still being made. They thought it all: - Employees desks: Open, able to have a better interactive session with the client - Waiting lines: NOT ANYMORE! Why not wait for your turn sitting down, comfortable, drinking coffee? - Entertainment: TV's with jokes, brochures, magazines - Color of the walls - Color of the lights -Decorations: Nature, plants. Really amazing! I was truly blown away with this. Now, when my dad tells me to go with him to the bank, I will definitely be more interested! Want to know what I'm really talking about? Watch this: This definitely inspired me for the classroom project, WHAT I want to do, HOW I want to do it, and most importantly WHY I want to do it.
Thank you to Interbank and Innova Schools for sharing a little bit of their story with us!
As the days pass by in the Innovation Academy, many of us have noticed that the classroom environment is definitely not appealing. We really are in desperate need for change! Last week I offered to plan the classroom project but we all needed to share our ideas for the classroom. From last two classes with Randy Scherer from High Tech High I noticed that communication and feedback was essential for everything you do so having a time during class when we all brainstormed ideas was very useful. After that we divided the class into three groups: walls, furniture, and others and this way we would somewhat become experts in these areas and see if it is feasible to make the changes we want to make. The classroom environment will affect everyone in the class including our teacher so by listening to people's perspective of their "perfect" classroom was absolutely helpful for me to also evaluate how these changes can work together. Here are some of our ideas for the furniture. News? The word news is not appealing to students at all so, why not call it storytelling? Everyone loves a great story. We can learn by being entertained all at once. In order to tell our story, we put together a video which would begin with people on our campus telling us their stories. We had some best moments in school and even some embarrasing moments. By watching "The Happy Secret to Better Work" by Shawn Achor I learned that storytelling can include jokes, personal anecdotes, and emotions in order to keep the audience interested Sometimes people believe that finding success in our lives will be our way of finding happiness. Watching the TED talk you can see that it's the other way around. Finding happiness is how you really succeed. "The Happy Secret to Better Work" by Shawn Achor Last night, Pedro, Andrea, and I were working on a prototype for class today. Our goal was to create a crossword which is related to school such as teachers, students, events, names, dates, etc. We presented our finished prototype this morning to our whole class and received feedback by exhibiting our work and having our classmates write constructive and/or positive feedback and we did too with the other groups. The feedback had to be "kind, specific, and helpful".
The feedback we received was very helpful to improve our crossword: "Cruci Break". Making our crossword visually appealing was very important with most of the people because when you are doing something, you need a motivation and a white piece of paper, as we had showed it wasn't very motivating; my group and I could agree on this. Since we are giving prizes for each winner who finishes the Cruci Break on time, we are going to need sponsors for these prizes, so we created a contract which will state how this will work. When a company offers its products for our winners, we have to give something back in return. This would be publicity to the different sponsors that will offer their products in exchange of publicity. However, the contract made was specifically to one type of company, plus it would be more efficient to create it in a way that other groups in our class can use it as well so we provide the same deals to the companies who will sponsor us. Finally, I found this activity very helpful because we can see other people´s perspective of how something can be improved so it is appealing to others. It was my first time in a black-room at school, actually quite recent. I had just entered the photography club and I went after school with two friends and we started developing photos. Once I began to develop the photos it was the first time I felt like photography was really "half magic half real". This might sound odd now but it was really thrilling once you saw what occurred to the paper. The photographic paper was exposed to the light with the camera roll and then dipped into some chemicals and there you had your photo. A few months later, during summer here in Lima a friend of mine asked me if I wanted to take photography lessons. I was very interested and obviously was positive about the idea. Photography seems to be something very basic to be a SIGNIFICANT learning experience but, it was actually something very productive and quite interesting. Something similar happened when I was taking these lessons. When I began these photography lessons I expected them to be only review of some of the camera settings and that was going to be it. But there was more to photography than I thought and I was really blown away. I had a feeling like there was no explanation for what photography could do and it was truly shocked, but exciting at the same time. Our teacher would tell us that there was more to just learning the camera settings but lighting and editing. The composition of a photo and how the colors appear on a photo was also mind blowing because it is actually a mix of ONLY three colors: blue, red, and green. A photo can be divided into these three colors and once they overlap, the photo is seen as a normal picture with all the right colors. It was really exciting for me to see that and all of those small, but significant moments made me be as interested in photography as I am now.
On our second week of the Innovation Academy we had a visit from Randy Scherer, a humanities teacher at High-Tech High who came from San Diego, California. All day long we innovated in many different ways. We began with interviews: first we practiced between us and once we went to interview other people I felt it was very different. My partner and I interviewed two teachers and a student and the answers were quite different. First, there are people that do not follow any type of news through social networks like Twitter and Facebook when others prefer to get their news from those sites because the news comes to them rather than they looking for it. Once we had our first interview done most of us noticed that there was an issue with the word "news" and I noticed this when I was interviewing a 10th grade student. When I asked him about news he was limited to answer my questions because his way of interpreting news was something different to what it really is. He realized by himself that maybe he did follow the news which was not necessarily in the newspaper or the news on TV so, he began to ask us: "Do you mean news like advertisements? Billboards? Magazines, etc?" And there was when I realized that the word news was not as appealing for some people than it did to others. From a teachers perspective I realized that they watch and follow news all the time wether it is online or on television or on a newspaper and mostly follow it to be informed. People have different ways of following their news but every one does it one way or another and different types of news wether it is sports, politics, economics, etc.
Later that day we came up with some problems that we see every day at school. This was my favorite part of the day because the way we came up with the problems and then solutions was very visual and we all collaborated with the possible solutions to solve our problems. One of these problems for example is homeroom. These ten minutes every morning could be more effective and interesting. The way we get our school news can be something completely different to the bulleting teachers read every morning and there are many ways we can do that. This was great because there might be other students who think the same and now we can give back to our community by solving a problem that we all share. Today was the first class official class of the innovation academy and I feel like most of us were nervous, or at least I was, but also very much excited. Right now we have many ideas for projects we want to do on our own and being part of The Break but we really don’t know how the two next years will turn out to be so that can be scary but also very thrilling. We had periods 1 through 4 today which meant we had the whole day to focus on the innovation academy. Alix and Carsten from The Break came to talk to us about how we will contribute to The Break and as the presentation went going a lot of ideas came to my mind about what we as a group could make and as we get used to it I believe this is going to be very successful.
Being in the same classroom from 8:00am until 3:20 made me realize how much we need to change our classroom environment ASAP. We all felt it I think and we really need a change. So, I have been interested in interior design for a while now, even thought to make it part of my future for a career path so I decided to take on this challenge and re-design our classroom or at least take a risk and try to do my best. But, the truth is I have an interest in interior design but I don’t know much about it and am not an expert so I will make this my first independent project for the year and I am currently researching possible internships that I could take. Overall the day was great and we had a lot of time to organize ourselves, get into our groups for The Break and this weekend I have a lot of research to do. My role for The Break is the “What’s Hot” section with two other people and for this weekend I have to search for something hot right now. I will keep you posted with how it turns out! :) |
AuthorStudent at Colegio Roosevelt in Lima, Peru. Archives
June 2015
Categories |