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TRUBA-the TRUBA is a robotic trash/recycling compactor with an arm and off road track. It detects trash/recycling with its camera but can also act as a stand alone machine.

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IV Seasons bench is a sitting area that can be found in parks or at bus stops. It has coils in the bench to heat/cool, depending on the season. There is also a water fountain to fill up water bottles to stay hydrated. The panel at the top protects users from snow/wind/rain.

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Students presented their ideas to students at the CTC and got some very valuable feedback

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Students presented to an authentic audience including parents and administrators

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The Cool Chair is a portable raft made for pools that allows the user to be on/near the water without getting wet. There is a suction cup that sticks to the bottom of the pool so they can stay in one place. The umbrella keeps the user shaded and there is a speaker and cup holder that can accommodate the user as needed.

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We had a local engineer come in for an interview. He gave us a lot of great insights into how engineers think and problem solve.

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After our need to know list, we created a stakeholders map based on our list.

This helped frame the beginning of our investigation stage as students thought about who was involved in this driving question and where we might start to investigate.

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To gain empathy for our stakeholders, we took stakeholders and created empathy maps around them. This created great conversation in groups around struggles and problems for each stakeholder related to the driving question. As we discussed, students started thinking about what questions they might want to ask stakeholders to investigate further.

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For our entry event, we learned the history behind Grand Rapids/West Michigan was named "Furniture City, USA." The students did a lot of investigating and found many fun facts

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GRAND RAPIDS, Mich. - On the second floor of the Grand Rapids Community Archive and Research Center are thousands of objects: desks, chairs, bed frames, stadium seats - even a trash can.

Each of those objects tells a different chapter of the same story: Furniture City.

"In Grand Rapids, it was...it really was a town that put kind of all of its eggs in that one basket of furniture making," said Alex Forist, the Grand Rapids Public Museum's chief curator.

It's a metaphorical basket formed by the foundation one man built 14 years before Grand Rapids became an official city.

"For a lot of people, this William Haldane, in about 1836, when he came to Grand Rapids, is kind of regarded as the 'Father of the Furniture City,'" Forist said.

Grand Rapids was just a frontier settlement at that point. It was a place missionaries, fur traders and Native Americans saw as their home, and a place Europeans saw as their future.

They were "starting to put down some roots and build up what would have been a small town of just a few 100 people," Forist said.

The boom started after the Civil War. The furniture industry needed a city with natural resources, people and access to markets.

Grand Rapids had all three.

"The rivers were how they got their raw materials to the factory," Forist said. "It was also an early source of power for the factories. A lot of them ran off of electricity that was generated by the flow of the Grand River."

As a result, Grand Rapids's growth took shape in a way the country had never seen.

"Something like 30% of the labor in Grand Rapids, you know, in the late 1800s, early 1900s, was working in this one industry," Forist said. "That's really uncommon, even in, you know, places that have an identification with a particular product like Detroit as the Motor City. Detroit was such a bigger city. The percentage of people that were working in automotive was smaller."

As the workforce increased, the industry evolved.

"The furniture factories in Grand Rapids - they figured out how to make something that looked [complex] and make it affordable to middle-class people," Forist said. "It wasn't an assembly line, but they used machinery, and they made things in parts and then assembled them all together."

Eventually, Michigan's hardwood forests began to vanish. The materials people used to create the furniture were essentially exhausted.

Some companies were able to adapt, like the Metal Office Furniture Company, which became known as Steelcase.

However, much of the local industry was hit with a second shock - one it couldn't survive.

"The roaring '20s were good to Grand Rapids and the furniture industry," Forist said. "Then, of course, the Great Depression happens and kind of brings it all crashing down."

Although the industry moved on, Grand Rapids still gives you a glimpse into what it once was.

While the Furniture City name has faded, it laid the groundwork for others to take its place.

"Furniture making really was baked into the early identity of the city," Forist said. "Even when that manufacturing left for other places, kind of in the mid-20th century, I think people had a hard time letting go of that, really, until a new identity, like Beer City, was there to take its place."
READ MORE: Learn the hidden history and secrets of Grand Rapids in this brand-new book

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how did grand rapids become furniture city

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Furniture City: The story behind Grand Rapids's original identity

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William Haldane, the so-called "Father of the Furniture Industry," settled in Grand Rapids in 1836 - 14 years before it became an official city.

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Our team crafted a bug list around challenges in furniture and then sorted their thinking to look for trending ideas.

Some things were talked about:

-Comfort/rigidity

-portability

-location

-texture

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Students wanted to make sure we were all on the same page with our expectations so we created a HOPES/FEARS/NORMS chart

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Create a furniture concept that provides individuals with unique needs, or for use in various environments (public spaces, private spaces, natural environments, business spaces, industrial spaces).

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Please list speakers and business partners you encountered throughout your journey.

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Please add quotes from students, parents, authentic audience, and any business/community members you utilized. Please use first names only.

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Show through pictures, videos, examples of student work, links to reflect how your students built empathy, determined Need to Knows, and uncovered important information to solve their driving question.

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Show through pictures, videos, examples of student work, and written documentation to reflect how teams were built, how students uncovered and understood the driving question, the standards covered, and the launch into the project.

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Show through pictures, videos, examples of student work to reflect on the check ins done throughout the project.  How did students reflect throughout the process? How did student critique and revise?

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Show through pictures, videos, examples of works to reflect on how students narrowed their ideas, determined their best solution, and developed the solution.

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Show through pictures, videos, examples of student work to reflect how your students came up with multiple ideas.

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Show through pictures, videos, examples of student work, to reflect on the authentic audience, the pitch, the final product. Include any information/pictures from your community partner.

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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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Please include a brief description and picture of each team's final idea.