Stepping away from redesigning school

After two weeks of research involving discussions, readings, and paper scribbles, I’ve come to the conclusion that education is not suitable for the nature of the two months we have to build a final project.

In the scope defined for us, we have to find a specific and limited problem that we should then build and solve for. The problem is that the specifics of education, e.g. student-teacher interaction, student-student collaboration, access and quality of information, are not something that can honestly be tackled individually within most educational systems. Even claiming the “system” is broken isn’t quite accurate because the follow-up question to that would be “in which country?” and consequently, “in what way?” Most of the time, the answer is politics and money.

There are already many new schools that have great offerings for education, the problem is that there simply aren’t enough of them yet. My belief is that there aren’t enough both because governments don’t want to invest in them but also because many parents and students aren’t aware of their existence or of their benefits.

If I was to make something specific to help a teacher or some group of students conquer code, science, math, what have you… I’d be in the world of yet another edTech app or edu-toy. There’s a plethora of those as well! They pop-up on Kickstarter on the daily and the ones that currently exist are constantly adding modules to their offerings.

Don’t get me wrong, alternative solutions that bring some competition are totally valid projects, but not ones that are limited by just under 8 weeks of time, of which I only have 6 left with little velocity in any given direction within education.

This is a well-reasoned and calculated decision and in fact, I have found the thing I’d love to tackle. I’ll link it here as soon as its ready for publishing.

For now, I look forward to these coming 6 weeks of hard work and to getting your reactions to the new project.

This is a progress update entry in my 7 week final thesis project at CIID. You can read all the other entries here.