Teaching design at the AMNH… with POV Mad Libs!

During a Game/Mobile Design internship at the American Museum of Natural History (Fall 2014) I worked on a program called “The Neanderthal Next Door,” which was

a 27-session youth program for 21 12th-graders that’s designed to develop and implement a digitally augmented (augmented reality-enhanced) print activity guide that explores the topic of human evolution through the frame of Neanderthals.

The piece of the program I worked on the most was developing a design-thinking approach that would guide the 12th-graders in their work. Given the time we had with the students, I thought an approach that used a selection of Stanford d.school’s Bootcamp Bootleg cards would work best. Below is a post about a few of the sessions that the program’s director, Barry Joseph, asked me to write for his blog, mooshme.org:

“‘PEOPLE NEED A CHANGE IN LIGHTING BECAUSE THEY WALK TO THE RIGHT’ – USING DESIGN-BASED LEARNING WITH MUSEUM TEENS”

Instructor facilitating POV Madlibs for high school students
The POV Mad Libs discussion – lead by the program’s Science Educator, Marissa Gamliel.
One of the many shuffles I did of d.school's Bootcamp Bootleg deck.
One of the many shuffles I did of d.school’s Bootcamp Bootleg deck.

And here’s an earlier part of the program curriculum focused on design (using the Bootcamp Bootleg deck):

d-school cards for sessions 9-16 (pdf)