How Can Kids Create a Design Brief?
This morning, Emilie and Sarah went around all the classes at South End School and asked the kids for their ides on what they would like to do with the back field. The kids were highly enthusiastic and bombarded us with oodles of fantastic ideas. No idea was a bad idea, we called this the 'Field of Dreams'. The ideas ranged from a Tunnel Web Spider Farm to a Chocolate Factory to a Robotics Lab.
For the afternoon workshop, we were lucky to have David Robinson from RobinsonCrimp Architecture come and facilitate this workshop. The students imagined and drew their own houses, then drew the route from their house to school and marked important landmarks to them that they see along the way.
The children then got into five groups and had to work together to come up with a list of their top ten ideas from the 'Field of Dreams' ideas.
The kids then got together as a group and mapped out which ideas were the most popular and eliminated those that were not. This gave us a strong starting point to give a design brief to the Architects.
From this exercise, the design brief will will include:
6 classrooms (Kitchen, robotics lab, outdoor classroom, technology room/science/bug lab, greenhouse, art/craft room with a vege garden, fruit trees, berry bushes and bird farm.
2. A bigger playground with a tree house and high ropes.
We will be looking into the feasibility of these ideas over the next while. As the project develops these ideas will most likely evolve and change but this gives us a great starting point.