When students are really into something, there’s a certain kind of silence that fills the room. The kind of silence you get when you’re bored or just sitting there staring at a screen. A group of twelve-year-olds are trying to figure out why their cardboard bridge keeps falling apart. The sound is focused and almost electric. That silence is clear to anyone who has been to MIT’s Day of Design.
The program, which came about because MIT has always believed in project-based problem-solving, brings real-life design problems into K–12 classrooms all over the US. If you write down the idea, it seems pretty simple: give students a real-world problem, some materials, and some time to build something. But what goes on inside that window often surprises everyone, even the teachers.
Figuring out what “hands-on learning” means in this situation is important because the phrase is used a lot but doesn’t always mean much. This isn’t a science fair kit with pieces already cut out and an answer labeled. When students at MIT’s Day of Design try to solve a problem, they are first asked to define it. This is a step that most standard curricula skip completely. It’s not as important as it might seem that difference.
The program is very different for many K–12 schools, especially those in districts that don’t have a lot of resources. It makes sense that schools are built around outcomes that can be measured. There will be a test soon. There’s a grade to get. Design thinking doesn’t like that kind of neat accountability by its very nature. It’s still not clear how most school systems will grade the work that students do during a Day of Design session. To be fair, that might be part of the point.
Teachers who have taken part usually say the same thing: they were skeptical at first, but then they felt like they had to admire the students. One middle school science teacher reportedly came in expecting chaos and left thinking again about how she had set up her whole unit on materials. That quiet change—one that isn’t big or sudden—is probably the best way to tell what the program is really doing.
As this project grows, it seems like MIT is trying to thread a very difficult needle. The program needs to be easy enough for schools that don’t have much to offer to be able to join, but tough enough that it doesn’t feel like a field trip with better branding. So far, it looks like it’s finding the right balance. However, getting to every part of a country as uneven as the United States is hard for a single program to do.
The fact that it’s put on by MIT isn’t what makes the Day of Design important. It’s based on the idea that students learn better when they are given real-life problems to solve. A lot of kids are told in school that there is a right answer and it’s their job to find it. Design challenges give students the chance to be wrong in interesting ways, which is something that most classrooms don’t do.
It’s really hard to say if it will scale the way its creators hope. It seems that these kinds of programs work best in schools that are used as examples and not so well when they go to places where they don’t have support from administrators or support from teachers. I think the people who put together the program know this tension better than anyone else.
Still, things are changing in the schools where it has spread. Students are making things, arguing about them, taking them apart, and then putting them back together again. In no way is that a revolution. But it’s also not nothing.
