The Nueva School's Innovative Learning Conference

When a recently rescued California brown-bear cub walked into the classroom, it captivated the students in a way that most teachers could only dream about. The students hung on every word of the handlers and it became apparent that if I could get a bear into my classroom I, too, could grab the attention of students like never before...

It is my responsibility as a design-thinking and makerspace teacher to engage potential builders, but getting them comfortable and absorbed in a foreign curriculum can be daunting. To overcome this obstacle I turned to a unique set of users and built a class around designing habitats for wild animals in captivity. Everything from the marketing to the curriculum for the class was designed to bring students who did not self-identify as makers into the Innovation Lab. Rather than structure the class as a traditional engineering elective, I built the semester around the goal of giving students an opportunity to work with real-world users and complete a full-cycle project in a single semester. Now, three years into the class, I will be discussing many of the lessons I have learned through iteration as well as the culture shift that occurred around students in the class and their comfort in the lab as time went on.