This week officially kicks off the second half of the semester. Starting from this week, I will do half lecture and half studio time for students to work on their new service project. For the final project, the theme is design for the community. Throughout this course, I first had students reflected on their individual experiences through Service Safari, then they worked in teams to analyze a service among their experience. Now, I want them to take the scale of the audience to the next level which is the community they belong to. Community can mean many different things as demonstrated during the first class, so first thing first, students will have to identify which community they want to design for and go from there.
I started the class with a modified Powerpoint Karaoke to set the tone for brainstorming rules and the yes-and mentality for group storytelling. Whether a project is successful or not, it's really up to how a team collaborates. When we had the jam as the primer of the final project, I know students had fun but they were not being graded for it, so their mentality could be different. Now they have 5 weeks to work on a new service design, I expect to see some conflicts but I am hopeful they will work things out as I've prepped them some best practices during our communication's class as well as through the discussion of team charter. I also believe they've acquired most of the technical skills they will need to work on a new service and this is the time for them to shine!
After my lecture (mostly focusing on Research), I sent students into their breakout rooms. As I made my rounds after an hour, I was able to hear many cool and refreshing ideas. I purposely avoid asking them what they want to do because I didn't want to give them feedback/direction too early on in the discussion. This is the time for them to think outside the box and be creative on the problems they want to solve!
Coming back from the breakout rooms, we were back to our routine of doing retrospective in our class canvas. Students didn't have much to address for this class since they mostly spent time on their group discussion but overall, I'm excited to see what they will do next as a class. Stay tuned!
