With design thinking, people often use the idea of “iteration”. It is the idea that you don’t do something once and be done with it. Instead, you take the result, learn from it and go back to make it better every time. And just like iteration in designing products and services, we manage to learn something new with every edition of DoCamp.
Last week (July 18-19, 2019) we did a very short DoCamp for fellows from United World Schools as a part of a collaboration through CSLP (read more about CSLP here). This one was a challenge for Abhisekh (Lab Master – DoLab, King’s College). For one, DoLab is missing one of the two Lab Masters for this Camp. So, no tag-teaming here. Also, there’s the challenge of distilling down a program that normally would run for months down to two days. With these shorter programs, we have never pursued the creation of finely polished solutions from the participants. These programs are always more to do with helping students learn a couple of key ideas.
Learning 1: Teams
Starting with day 1, we managed to mix up the students into somewhat interdisciplinary teams from what seemed like people from the same background. For the students, the learning out of mixing them up into diverse groups has usually ended as a lesson that you don’t always get to choose who you work with. Another side of this kind of deliberate shuffling of groups is that the teams also get enriched with very different perspectives into their discussions.
Learning 2: Time
“You gave us one and a half hours to prepare for the presentation and just three minutes for the presentation. And I didn’t like that.”
The mental image of Janne (Lab Master, OAMK Labs, Finland) saying “You will never have enough time” becomes more real every time. It was not just for the participants. We Coaches and Lab Masters also never seem to have enough time.
“Can I get more than 15 minutes for my keynote?”…
“Yes, you can get 5 more seconds.”
Learning 3: Your “background”
At the end of day 1, the general tone of the room was that the exercises and processes we put the participants through were “not relevant” for them. Questions like how these ideas apply to teaching and the idea that the workshop was more relevant to “business students” came up. Guess what? At the end of the second day, no one was complaining. Most of the participants realized that they were also capable in their own way to solve the problems they were presented with.
photos – Sudin Bajracharya and Raunak Chaudhari
__________
Want to join the next DoCamp?
We are crossing the t’s and dotting the i’s for the next two month DoCamp at King’s College. If you want to take the challenge to try to change something and learn along the way, keep your eyes open and your ears listening. We’ll be announcing applications soon.
