Innovate for Impact

What’s Happening in these Pictures?

WHAT

As a culminating action of unit on the history of innovations and the impacts innovations have on societies, students were given the challenge of designing a future innovation to positively impact their local community given our current challenges and needs in 2020. 

Students applied and transferred their knowledge, skills, and understandings, collaborated virtually, and designed a product to meet an identified need. They ran impact analyses on their innovations, and pitched their products to a series of SFS administrators and staff members as a means of direct research, advocacy, and taking action to positively impact the local community.  

WHY

Educational research continues to illuminate that one of the best ways to achieve deeper learning is to develop opportunities for application and transfer of skills into authentic and real world contexts. By utilizing the approaches to learning and MYP criteria, students applied concepts of innovative learning to the real world challenges outlined by the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals.

HOW

In the MYP Individuals and Societies class, students built a background on the history of innovations, impacts on innovations in the past (both positive and negative), and after honing in on their research and writing skills. 

Empathy was launched by Aaron Moniz from Inspire Citizens, coming in with a call to action: “Innovators Wanted”. From there, students explored the United Nations Sustainable Develop Goals (SDGs) that were most pertinent to them. 

After forming groups based on their interests, passions, and desire for positive change, groups began investigating and becoming aware of the root causes of global sustainability issues, similar innovations that exist, professionals in their field of interest, and conducting interviews and surveys to collect data from peers on local manifestations of the SDGs. 

Students prepared for action by creating a pitch, practicing their speaking and presentation skills, and applied their skills to create their virtual pitch, including research-based to justifications of the impact of their product in a design brief. The pitches were received by community leaders with the best to be taken into next steps for strategic planning and operations decisions.

Thank you

Cameron Munce and Jo Bigwood for their innovation, risk-taking and commitment to deep learning in real world, authentic contexts. Thank you to our judges and community members for listening to student voice and agency and allowing learning to live past the walls of 2020’s “Zoom Challenges”.