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How might we improve social connections within our school to support wellbeing and a sense of belonging?

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In order to build our team, we wanted to set expectations and get our hopes + fears on the table. We learned our team is made up of competitive individuals who strive to have fun, help our community, and continue search for the best idea!

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Our team was ready and excited to pitch their two ideas to the jury! We listened to all the middle school teams pitch their ideas before ending with our teams. This did make us a bit nervous, but we were confident in our solutions being a winner and able to make change in our building.

We are excited to announce both of our teams are advancing to the finals to pitch against Kent and Muskegon county schools on February 27!

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Brighter Walls, Brighter Minds Pitch Deck

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Brighter Walls, Brighter Minds Pitch Deck

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We practiced pitching our solution before our visit to the Careerline Tech Center so that we might be able to gain the greatest amount of useful feedback prior to the end of the challenge. Our business partner, Esox, has been amazing!

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Next, we practiced pitching our solutions many different times to student teams at the Careerline Tech Center. Each time we pitched, we gained valuable insight and affirmations into our solution. We arrived back to school with a list of pluses and deltas to work on in the final week leading up to the final pitch at GRCC Lakeshore.

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Our team took 100 Ideas very seriously. They were determined to get rid of as much of their post-it note stack as possible in the eight minutes we gave them to brainstorm of ideas that would improve social connections in our building, as well as, promote belonging and wellbeing.

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We created a hybrid protocol of Pluses and Deltas with Love Letter/Break-Up Letter. This was perfect as we were just starting out the school year, transitioning from 6th grade to 7th grade, and transitioning from one admin team to another. Our top portion of the list was all about our 5/6 building (White Pines). The bottom portion of the list was about our school. We had some crossover between lists. At times, there are things that we wished Lakeshore had or did that White Pines did not. We also did a little analysis with our 8th grade team members who have encountered the greatest amount of change for our building.

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Next, we felt it was critical to unpack the driving question to best understand how we need to approach our investigation. We unpacked three critical words: social connections, wellbeing, and belonging. For each word, we were give 2 minutes to think of everything that came to mind about that word, rip a sticky note off, and slap it in the middle of the poster. Then, we would gather at random sticky notes and take turns reading aloud what everyone had written for the word. Astonishingly enough, there was very little overlap of ideas. Once we were finished, Ms. Ingram and Ms. Carmody took all the sticky notes and typed them up in a neat document for us to refer back to as we investigate and incubate.

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The team hard at work unpacking the word 'social connection.'

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Reading and discussing the breakdown of the driving question.

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We first began by listing people who were stakeholders in our solution. Then, we made connections between individuals or groups to determine who might be connected. It's incredible to think how so many individuals or groups are stakeholders in our solution. We will have to narrow our solution to fit a few groups, but our hope is that the solution we select will have a ripple effect and connect with the other individuals or groups of people.

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AEIOU was a new protocol for most of our futurePREP'd team. We spent nearly an hour going through the protocol combing through all aspect of activities, the environment, interactions, objects, and users as it related to our driving question. We left objects blank since we felt there was nothing critical that stood out as non-typical. As we were creating our lists, we had some excellent discussions that helped us to think a bit deeper into the issue.

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Everyone had an idea to pitch that emerged from Saturate and Group. Students were tasked with creating a poster to use to pitch to the team their idea.

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Once posters were created, students had one minute to pitch their idea to their teammates. Pictured above is one of the ideas that scored the highest in the NUFF Test + Three Cones (see below), and how they decided to divide up the work toe expand upon each section for our final solution to pitch at the West Michigan Design Challenge.

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We have continually added to our Need to Know list as we have continued our investigation to uncover some answers to determine what might be feasible, stakeholders we need to interview, "filters" to consider during incubation, and general questions to investigate. This list is on the wall when we're meeting to help us check something off the list when we learned of an answer.

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We broke up into three groups to create interview questions: administrators, guidance counselors, and students. After brainstorming a long list of questions, we met with a different group to help us determine the best fit of open-ended versus close-ended questions. From there, we had to narrow questions to either a top 5 or a top 3 in each category. Meeting with a different group helped us to bring a different perspective and/or find other ways a question was worded to better revise other questions. The outcome was a simplified question list to ask our guidance counselors, a simplified question list to ask our administrators, and a concise student survey for our student body.

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"This experience has Future Prep'd me, it has given experience talking with my peers and those older than me. I'm also better at taking feedback, I know that it comes from a place of wanting to help make us better." [Daphne]

"West Michigan Design Prize has been fun, it has helped me grow." [Meredith]

"There's a certain joy you receive from being able to work with such clever people, unattainable otherwise." [Alessa]

"My experience working in Future Prep'D on the design challenge was fun, and it's my favorite extracurricular! I loved the challenge and it was a fun way to socialize with friends." [Jackson]

"Working in Future Prep'D was great. It gives you a new opportunity not only to find more people with the same interests as you, but it also gives you a chance to improve your problem solving skills." [Cruze]

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Esox Engineering

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Take time to reflect on what went well. What will you change for next year? What feedback did you get from students, the business partner, the authentic audience that can help make this project even better?

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To begin our quest in search of how we might improve social connections within our school, we went on scavenger hunt looking for all the places and spaces that help foster social connections at Lakeshore. We also made note of spaces in the building that we observed an opportunity might be available and needing further investigation.

We learned there are not many physical spaces to help with social connections, but also noticed that space is a constraint. There are bulletin boards and directional signs that could help support a sense a belonging already in place. One of the reoccurring observations was boring walls and lots of items/boxes in the windows visible from the hallways.

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Our team is composed of all four creative types! We are very balanced in all areas, which will prove to be beneficial as we progress through the creative sequence. For some of our futurePREP'd and Academy alumni, this was a different variation of Creative DNA than done before. Win!

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Sammy listening to a question to determine if it sounds like her.

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Norah and Madelyn are tuned in for sharing our Creative DNA

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As we head out of Investigation and into Incubation, we used the protocol, Draw the Problem, to help illustrate where we feel the greatest problem is with social connections, wellbeing, and belonging at school that we could improve. When it came time to reveal our drawings and explanations, we noticed a common underlying theme: lunch time. Whether it was an issue about being a new student looking for a place to sit in the cafeteria, group dynamic issues, or lack of structure on the field, we are beginning to think we could narrow a scope to lunch time. When our survey data from students comes back in a week, we are curious to see if the student body shares similar feelings.

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After 100 Ideas, our team sorted them first on the windows into similar groups before giving them a group label (blue post-it note). We did several variations of saturate and group to help narrow our ideas. Our teachers asked us to filter ideas through different "funnels," such as: social connections, wellbeing, belonging, new, and feasible.

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As previously mentioned, we had to take ideas we narrowed from Saturate and Group to go through Three Cones. If an idea made it through the first round, it had to make it through the second round, and so forth. At the end, we were left with a handful of ideas we could then work to develop and pitch to our team.

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We combined the NUFF Test and our Three Cones to rate each idea that was pitched from our Poster Session. As a team, students had to come to a consensus on how they would rate the idea in each category. By the end of rating each idea, it was evident the direction our team needed to head.

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After many work sessions afterschool and at lunch, our team was proud to present their concept and products to our business partner, Esox Engineering; administrators, Cortney Naber and Brad Cusumano; and, futurePREP'd leader, Alyssa Bellers. Our audience had excellent questions and critique to help our solution become the best it could be.