The Design for Giving Contest for Riverside School

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Message The Design for Giving Contest Designer turned educator Kiran Bir Sethi started the Riverside School in 2001 in Ahmedabad, a large city in the northwestern state of Gujarat, India. She created her own K-8 curriculum, based on six beacons of learning, with the goal of “infecting children with the ‘I Can’ bug.” Sethi’s thinking was that, by blurring the boundaries between school and life, young students would become aware, enabled, and empowered to effect change in the world. Nearly 300 children now attend the school, which has also widely shared its lesson plans with other institutions. Last year, Sethi sought to spread her can-do message to millions of children across India through a contest called Design for Giving. She tapped IDEO and the d.school at Stanford to join as “knowledge partners.” As such, the group collaborated on the contest rules, tools, and platforms, shaping the steps of the human-centered design process so that they’d be accessible to children and teachers in various conditions throughout India with little or no previous exposure to design. To do so, the team created various drafts of the competition’s process and tried the tools with kids and teachers in various school settings (urban and rural, public and private). The team also interviewed students, teachers, and principals in order to understand their needs, perceptions, and abilities to conduct a design process in which kids were asked to make changes in their communities. Based in these experiences, the group refined the framing of the contest to be about four simple, actionable steps: 1 Feel. Kids were asked to go into their communities and “feel” the problems around them, and the needs that people have who face those problems. 2 Imagine. Then, they were asked to brainstorm the many ways they could address these problems based in people’s needs and wants. 3 Do. They had one week where they were asked to put one of these ideas into action. 4 Share. Tell back the story, noticing the impact on both the community and themselves. The team shaped the rules so that students could learn core design-thinking skills - such as empathy, brainstorming, collaboration, and reflection - by merely participating in the contest. And together, the group developed a toolkit to walk students through this simple four-step process. The biggest challenges to the contest were overcoming the lack of infrastructure, language barriers, and a discrepancy in school resources. There was no national database of schools for easy outreach, so Riverside built relationships with NGOs across India to distribute the contest toolkit to more than 30,000 schools. The toolkit was translated into eight languages, and the team had to develop a vast network of judges with consistent evaluation rubrics in order to accommodate all entries. Also, the materials available to students varied wildly: Some entries came as handwritten pages, some as sketches, some as PowerPoint presentations with embedded photos, and others as YouTube videos. The group had to build a structure where all of these different ways of submitting stories of action would be accepted, as to not leave out less privileged schools. The competition, open to all 10- to 13-year-olds nationwide, called for teams of up to five students supervised by a teacher or mentor to spend seven days pursuing a project designed to prompt change in their communities. They were encouraged to time their work with the nation’s Joy of Giving Week in late September, but the contest ran from August 15 to October 15, 2009. By the deadline, more than 1,300 entries were received from rural, suburban, and urban schools across the country. Project themes included alcoholism, child labor, civic pride, education, elderly care, health care, illiteracy, pollution, recycling, smoking, and traffic safety. Winners in seven categories, ranging from boldest ideas to those easiest to replicate, were chosen based on potential to benefit a large number of people, to look at an existing problem with a fresh perspective, to effect significant change in one week, and to see change not only in others’ lives, but also in the lives of the students themselves. For example, the top entries included a project in which students from Divine Child High School in a slum of Mumbai began teaching their parents basic literacy, drafting lesson plans that included games and role-playing activities. In another, students from RV Public School in Bangalore started to solve a chronic blood shortage for emergency procedures by waging a door-to-door public-awareness campaign; they registered 55 residents as potential donors within a week. The contest reached at least 60,000 students in 2009. In 2011, more than 300,000 schools in 33 countries participated in a global event called the Design for Change school challenge. http://www.ideo.com/work/the-design-for-giving-contest

Designer turned educator Kiran Bir Sethi started the Riverside School in 2001 in Ahmedabad, a large city in the northwestern state of Gujarat, India. She created her own K-8 curriculum, based on six beacons of learning, with the goal of “infecting children with the ‘I Can’ bug.” Sethi’s thinking was that, by blurring the boundaries between school and life, young students would become aware, enabled, and empowered to effect change in the world. Nearly 300 children now attend the school, which has also widely shared its lesson plans with other institutions.

Last year, Sethi sought to spread her can-do message to millions of children across India through a contest called Design for Giving. She tapped IDEO and the d.school at Stanford to join as “knowledge partners.” As such, the group collaborated on the contest rules, tools, and platforms, shaping the steps of the human-centered design process so that they’d be accessible to children and teachers in various conditions throughout India with little or no previous exposure to design.

To do so, the team created various drafts of the competition’s process and tried the tools with kids and teachers in various school settings (urban and rural, public and private). The team also interviewed students, teachers, and principals in order to understand their needs, perceptions, and abilities to conduct a design process in which kids were asked to make changes in their communities. Based in these experiences, the group refined the framing of the contest to be about four simple, actionable steps:

1 Feel. Kids were asked to go into their communities and “feel” the problems around them, and the needs that people have who face those problems.

2 Imagine. Then, they were asked to brainstorm the many ways they could address these problems based in people’s needs and wants.

3 Do. They had one week where they were asked to put one of these ideas into action.

4 Share. Tell back the story, noticing the impact on both the community and themselves.

The team shaped the rules so that students could learn core design-thinking skills - such as empathy, brainstorming, collaboration, and reflection - by merely participating in the contest. And together, the group developed a toolkit to walk students through this simple four-step process.

The biggest challenges to the contest were overcoming the lack of infrastructure, language barriers, and a discrepancy in school resources. There was no national database of schools for easy outreach, so Riverside built relationships with NGOs across India to distribute the contest toolkit to more than 30,000 schools. The toolkit was translated into eight languages, and the team had to develop a vast network of judges with consistent evaluation rubrics in order to accommodate all entries. Also, the materials available to students varied wildly: Some entries came as handwritten pages, some as sketches, some as PowerPoint presentations with embedded photos, and others as YouTube videos. The group had to build a structure where all of these different ways of submitting stories of action would be accepted, as to not leave out less privileged schools.

The competition, open to all 10- to 13-year-olds nationwide, called for teams of up to five students supervised by a teacher or mentor to spend seven days pursuing a project designed to prompt change in their communities. They were encouraged to time their work with the nation’s Joy of Giving Week in late September, but the contest ran from August 15 to October 15, 2009. By the deadline, more than 1,300 entries were received from rural, suburban, and urban schools across the country. Project themes included alcoholism, child labor, civic pride, education, elderly care, health care, illiteracy, pollution, recycling, smoking, and traffic safety.

Winners in seven categories, ranging from boldest ideas to those easiest to replicate, were chosen based on potential to benefit a large number of people, to look at an existing problem with a fresh perspective, to effect significant change in one week, and to see change not only in others’ lives, but also in the lives of the students themselves. For example, the top entries included a project in which students from Divine Child High School in a slum of Mumbai began teaching their parents basic literacy, drafting lesson plans that included games and role-playing activities. In another, students from RV Public School in Bangalore started to solve a chronic blood shortage for emergency procedures by waging a door-to-door public-awareness campaign; they registered 55 residents as potential donors within a week.

The contest reached at least 60,000 students in 2009. In 2011, more than 300,000 schools in 33 countries participated in a global event called the Design for Change school challenge.