Almost time to start the detailed planning for the 2019-2020 school year and among the things I relearned this summer at CS4Teachers at the UW was design charrettes. This was a lesson worked on with students who do the K12 outreach for HCDE (Human Centered Design & Engineering) program at the U of W and essentially ran like this article https://www.hcde.washington.edu/news/charettes-k-12-outreach. A quick glance around the UW campus found other places like the CBE (College of Built Environments) http://archpac.be.uw.edu/new-student-charrette/ using them as well.

I will start working on the details the week before school starts as I intend to use this as a new student introduction activity in my IB (International Baccalaureate) CS classes. It isn’t because they require that level of expertise, simply that they really lend themselves to organizing and teaching the process and time for designing and implementing a project which is a key for the year for that program.

It would be really cool to put it into play in the regular course, perhaps in outlining a Mobile game interface, mostly because the Marvel App (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.marvelapp) made ALL the difference along with the practice.

Reflection: I learned Design Charrettes a few years ago and yet they didn’t jump out at me as they did now that I wish to have a quick way to provide a fundamental design experience to an entire class without lecturing.