Design Thinking Challenges

Doe jij als leerling samen met jouw leerkracht of docent met de Design Thinking Challenges voor PO en VO in Leiden en omstreken? Join! Doe mee!

Vind hier de Toolkit Design Thinking De Leidse Aanpak (lesmateriaal) met een Instruction Video.

Je kunt je opgeven voor verschillende Design Thinking Challenges:

1. Challenging Perspectives in het kader van Leiden400 met het Rijnlands Lyceum Oegstgeest, Erfgoed Leiden en Plymouth Public Schools, US, in 2020-2022. Dit is een global project in English met een museum debat samen met Erfgoed Leiden eraan voorafgaand, Engelstalig en Nederlandstalig. Winnaars: Nathaniel Kerr, Sean Hales, Jack George, Karam Alkaissy, and Florian van Noort.

Toward Thanksgiving – A Multiperspective Board Game

Note for educators

Introduction

“How could the story of the Mayflower be commemorated together?” This was the challenge put forward to mixed American and Dutch teams of school students in the project “Our 400” in early 2020! The challenge question was assembled by the project group comprising Heritage Leiden, Plymouth Public Schools and Evenzo Consultancy, working closely together with the municipal commemoration groups in Leiden (NL) and Plymouth (USA).

With this challenge question, students were put on a learning trajectory in which they would discover the history of the pilgrims, research and exchange perspective on local histories, as well as gage the wider significance, consequences and legacy of this event in world history. While digesting these elements, the students were guided to pilot Design Thinking methodology, supported by Leiden-based Bureau Talent. This meant that they had the opportunity to design and prototype solutions to the challenge.

Designs were expected to win by:

• Being sensitive to and showing awareness of inclusivity in the history, legacy and memory of the Pilgrims’ journey. 
• Being built on historical analysis and with historical thinking skills (e.g. usage of sources, exploration of perspectives, reflection on narratives, eye for chronology and complexity (etc)
• Demonstrating empathy towards various points of view by engaging with advisors and showing how advice was received and processed, or not and why.
• Being original, creative and innovative in showing a different and exciting perspective, approach or method.

Leiden 400 partner and English teacher at the Rijnlands Lyceum Oegstgeest, Marleen Spierings, took on the mission to get her students involved. In these difficult months of 2020 and 2021, uncertainty and lockdowns, 12 of her students took up the challenge to work together with their American counterparts. Most of these students were also already involved with the innovative Museum Debate Challenge. 

Every two weeks they received new briefs on how to advance their joint orientation on the challenge, including multiperspective resources, tailor-made videos from the wider mayflower remembrance and heritage communities and structural forms to craft and deliver their prototypes. Then, in mid-July, an expert jury – also transatlantic in composition – met online to review the 5 team proposals submitted. 

The student teams had taken up the challenge and understood well that commemoration is an activity which has to make sense in the present, is oriented toward the future, but remains firmly rooted in an understanding of the past. Some of the teams prototyped VR tours or social commemoration days, but only two prototypes were chosen to advance to the next stage. One is an idea for a board game in which perspective-taking plays a key role. The other is a design for a monument in two parts; one in Leiden and one in Plymouth.

Originally, the two chosen teams were supposed to go on a two-leg exchange during which they would be able to work out their prototypes, test it with key user audiences and finalise and present their work to the public. The corona crisis has unfortunately made it impossible to do this. One of the teams, however, pushed ahead, and developed an elaborated design for a multiperspective board game!

The student team “The Fantastic Five” consisted of:  Nathaniel Kerr, Sean Hales, Jack George, Karam Alkaissy, and Florian van Noort. Their initial pitch was called  “Voyage 400, a commemorative historical board game”, which they envisaged as: a mix of the popular board game, the Game of Life, and the online video game, the Oregon Trail with its own little twist. The game is based around a set of choices you make at each stop on your journey. With the possibility of an online platform for the game, it describes the hardships, choices, and events that occurred on and off the Mayflower. It will be similar to a choose-your-own-adventure book, where you make your own decisions that impact how your game plays out. This will most likely be a single player game but could be modified to become multiplayer. This online version would require a computer software technician and a game design specialist however, being on the internet would eternalize this commemorative piece.

The project team had selected their pitch for further development, but also offered constructive feedback that it should be made more inclusive of the Wampanoag perspectives. With that in mind, and supported by historical game didactics expert Koen Henskens (University of Applied Science HAN, The Netherlands, the team formulated the following outline:

Due to the increased complexities of working together across continents in times of Covid-19 and the ever-increasing delay in delivery of this project, another route was chosen to try and make the design of the winning student team into a reality. Koen Henskens, supported by the project team, took the game design and developed it into a playable prototype. 

In short: The game you have now received, is the result of an international project, is a design initiated by a team of students from both Leiden (NL) and Plymouth (USA) and is developed into a prototype for you to test. Both Heritage Leiden and Plymouth Public Schools are welcome to include it in their offer of educational resources. We hope it will continue to be used on/around Thanksgiving to help students recognise how history is presented from a variety of viewpoints, learn about this particular episode and gain new confidence in studying history.

Educational use

The gameplay itself is explained in the handout. The game itself can be used by educators who wish to (1) Develop students’ knowledge of the history of the Pilgrim-Wampanoag encounter; (2) Develop students’ ability to learn through perspective taking, and more.

It is important that educators contextualise this game. This is best to be done after the game is played, as the act of perspective-taking and the way in which the game is designed, is helpful to ensure a more empathic conversation. The game can help classes wage conversations around consequences, legacy and remembrance of the colonial encounter.

In the United States, this topic features prominently in historical (memory) culture, as well as in education. However, the focus is usually on the arrival of the pilgrims and/or their origins in England, but rarely including the period in which they lived in Leiden.

In The Netherlands, the topic is far less prevalent. But the game design allows it to be played with limited pre-existing knowledge, as well as more context knowledge.

Societal heritage context

The game is designed to help students make sense of the past, but inevitably, it does so in the future, and is in itself a representation of norms and biases of the present. We think it is important to make these dispositions also visible and discussable. The game purposefully steers away from a colonising-game, and recognises the asymmetry of the historical encounter, as well as the painful consequences and traumatic legacies. Whereas the arrival of the pilgrims has been used to build a white-settler national culture in the USA, the historical experiences of the Wampanoag and other Native American Nations, have been overlooked structurally for centuries. One board game can not reconcile these different perspectives, but seeks to address them in a fundamental, but also engaging and playful way, so that students may get further interested and see how the past continues to impact the present in the world around them.

Words and images

The developers of the game are experienced history educators, facilitators of educational projects, heritage professionals and didacticians who are not Wampanoag. In fact, the game is developed mainly in The Netherlands. In order to ensure both historical reliability as well as respectful representation of historical actors, we have sought to adhere to inclusive words and images. But we did not have the opportunities to consult well with all stakeholders, due to the distance and shortage of time.

It is important that educators know that the images of the Wampanoag which are included in the board game are based on historical sources. These were, however, made by European colonists, and could be themselves seen as exoticisations and testimonials to a sense of white superiority of the time. 

Educators would do well to mention this in the class as a conversation starter around historically rooted stereotypes.  In further iterations of this game, it would be good to build clear methodological and didactic guidelines on how to do this well.

Who was involved?

The project was a direct cooperation of two cities, Leiden (NL) and Plymouth (USA). The SC includes expertise in history and heritage education, design thinking methodology and the coordinator and partners in the project.

Project Coordinators:

• Jonathan Even-Zohar (Evenzo Consultancy, on behalf of Leiden400)
• Marleen Spierings (Rijnlands Lyceum)
• Rob Powers, K-12 Social Studies Curriculum Coordinator, Plymouth Public Schools
• Susan Suèr, Education Expert, Heritage Leiden

Board game developer 2021: Koen Henskens (HAN University of Applied Science)
Steering Committee:

• Lineke van Tricht, Design Thinking Expert, De Leidse Aanpak & Bureau Talent
• Remme van der Nat, History Educator, Visser ‘t Hooft Lyceum
• Elise Storck, History Teacher Trainer, Leiden University
• Dr. Christopher Campbell, Assistant Superintendent, Plymouth Public Schools

OTHER DESIGN THINKING CHALLENGES

2. Super Challenge: leerlingen van groepen 8 en brugklassen van SCOL scholen. Deze leerlingen komen 6/7 keer een middag bij elkaar om met elkaar een DT Challenge uit te voeren. We richten ons hierbij op talentvolle leerlingen die behoefte hebben aan een uitdagen/ andere manier van leren (creatieve denkers). Periode: januari / maart 2022. 6 of 7 dinsdagmiddagen. Teams bestaan uit 2 leerlingen groep 8 en 1 brugklasser. Coaches komen van de SCOL scholen PO/ VO. Join! Doe mee!

3. SDG Challenges Leiden European City of Science 2022. Join! Doe mee!

4. Design Thinking in de school: De Leidse Aanpak met innovatie subsidie Gemeente Leiden. Basisscholen ontwikkelen hun eigen DT project, passend in hun eigen situatie, aansluitend bij hun reguliere curriculum. Training in DT en begeleiding van het project. Ervaringsscholen: Pacelli, Schakel, Joseph en Bernardus.  Zijlwijkschool > gelijkheid/ duurzame school, groep 8. Gevers Deynoot > eerlijke kleding plusgroep. Alle scholen SBBA> buitenspeelmogelijkheden bij school: alle topgroepen. In dit project wordt samenwerking gezocht met Technolab/ VR lab > partners Leidse Aanpak  en met PABO (studenten draaien mee). Join! Doe mee!

De Toolkit heeft een Engelse en Nederlandse versie en biedt een uitgebreid stappenplan voor de methode gebaseerd op de 5 stappen van Design Thinking:

• Empathize
• Define
• Ideate
• Prototype
• Test

Dit is een samenwerking tussen Objectwijs, Debat & Design Challenges-Leiden en De Leidse Aanpak.