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Mrs. Thompson-Tate's Environmental Science students worked with the student leadership team to design an outdoor classroom that would encourage students to take ownership of keeping their courtyard clean and available for teachers to use during ideal weather.
After brainstorming, the students decided a good start would be to provide picnic tables where students could sit, use Chromebooks, read, write, and talk. They began by finding a design they agreed on and creating a spreadsheet with prices for items needed.
Students in this class created a prototype, by making ONE table. The student leadership team kids would be here all year, and would learn from the experience of making ONE table to streamline other items build by future classes. We learned that a student miscalculation led to an error on our initial picnic table. We made an adjustment, but we were able to correct that when ordering out materials for the other five. Rolling out a project slowly like this creates lower stakes for students to make small mistakes without them affecting the final product (You can see the "first draft" picnic table in the front of this picture compared to the others sorrounding it).
This prototype table gave the adults an opportunity to think of how we could scale up the project to efficiently make 5 more. We decided to do it with students who were available during the extended class periods on testing "shut down" days near the end of the semester.
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