After students worked through the understanding and practice of what an empathy interview is with the ice cream sundae challenge, teachers introduced the design thinking project students engaged in around the Social Emotional Learning characteristic of Self Awareness.

The first step was to have the students engage in a silent brainstorm and share their thinking about self awareness- what was it and what was it not- and then they collected thoughts and did a silent sort to generate themes.

Next, students went out into the Parker community and collected more ideas about the topic from a range of people, including teachers, staff, and younger and older students. Fifth graders generated empathy interview questions to help them get to the heart of thinking about these ideas to better understand and then better create a game that would help people think more about this thinking.