bucky said it.

the future: from 6th grade and beyond!

The blog is now going to shift from just a research to more project base. The work with JCJ and Push is complete and I am now going to use this as a forum for the projection of my work and my partners' work on the Classroom of the Future Competition by the Open Architecture Network. My partners are highly experienced and extremely bright. I am working with Ms. Kathleen Miles 6th grade class at 6th Period.The school is George Washington Carver Middle School in South Central, LA. These kids are amazing. Below is the existing classroom.
The first day of class with them was thursday. I asked "What is Architecture?" right off the bat. Here are the answers they kids gave me::
-designing things in your mind for people
-building stuff
- art/ designing stuff
- sketching what you want to design
-thinging about what you're going to make
- designing your ideas and places and new things
- create stuff
- using your imagination and drawing on walls
- building something different
- drawing something and people make it
- brainstorming and thinking about the future

What great definitions of architecture! If only architects used these more often. Ms. Miles and I then had the kids draw and write where they liked to study or learn and what would help them learn more. I have to scan the drawings in but here is a quick collage I made from some of their suggestions.
Today we worked on measurements. We will probably continue for a few more classes. We also started to draw the plan of the school. I will try to get the kids blogs to link to them on here. Like I said, they are just remarkable.

Learning at Jet Speed?

Let's talk about recycling our environments for the future. What an exciting space to be learning in? What a great space to let the minds of our future fly off into the clouds of their imaginations?! The Kingsland Primary School just got the ticket to ride!
This 82ft-long commercial airliner is now the UK's and clearly the worlds first plane classroom for school pupils. Originally a commuter plane, this Short 360 was decommissioned after thousands of hours of flying businessmen to Ireland and Spain. Instead of finding its days rotting in a graveyard, it has taken its final landing to be recycled as a classroom. The head teacher said " We wanted an outside classroom and talked to the children about the kind of space they wanted and they came up with the idea of a plane themselves so we thought we would see how we could go about buying one."

There is a new rise in redesigning the portable classroom. I guess it was above our heads all along. It was purchased for less than £20,000 – half the price of a boring portable box classroom which we all dislike. The cockpit will be filled with whiteboards, desks and laptops as to make it a user-friendly learning space for a class of 30 pupils for a geography class. How perfect? Flying right into the future. Souce1: Daily Mail. Source2: Treehugger.

you are the future

I am working on a research project for Push Architecture and JCJ Architecture based on the LAUSD system. Having all this new knowledge, I thought why not have a blog about this and have this info in a concentrated form with my own criticisms of course. I will also try to get some teachers' point of views. I am looking at public/charter/private schools but really focusing on the potential of change in public and charter because they are free. We have to help our youth learn that they are brilliant and they can do anything and make anything. How can the space help reveal self confidence and social comfort? How can the space be a place for Project Based Learning?