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Four months of Fountaineering

Tash Lee, Futurelab

Much of current educational debate relates to the need to develop an education system that will adequately prepare our young people for life and work in the 21st century. There is a call to personalise learning – to start with the skills, knowledge and experiences that people already possess, to make learning more creative and to include and involve young people in decisions about their education. There is much criticism about the rigidity and inflexibility of the National Curriculum, and about young people arriving at university waiting to be told what to do. There is a lot of discussion about competencies – developing skills rather than transmitting content - and the fact that to be successful in the 21st century young people need to ‘learn how to learn’. According to the rhetoric we need to create learners that are resilient, creative and flexible, can collaborate, solve problems, and think critically…

The Fountaineers project came to Futurelab from Sean McDougall of Stakeholder Design, through our 2006 Call for Ideas programme, which focused on 're-imagining learning spaces’. The focus of the project is the design and construction of programmable, interactive and intelligent water fountain, but the project is much more than that. The researchers, designers, owners and engineers of this fountain are the pupils and teachers of Luckwell Primary School in Bristol - all 220 of them! Through the design and decision making processes pupils (and staff) are not only learning about designing fountains, they are also learning how to work in teams, how to research and investigate, how to prototype and test things out. They are setting their own problems and then working together to solve them. They are increasingly beginning to direct their own learning. Fountaineers is giving us an opportunity to try out a different educational approach for real, to give teachers time and space to try new ways of supporting their pupils’ learning. It is a chance to involve young children in decision making and to demonstrate that they are much more capable than might be expected of primary age pupils.

Luckwell Primary, along with Stakeholder Design and Futurelab, has been ‘Fountaineering’ now for four months. Everyone involved is seeing the project as a learning journey - likened to the first expedition to the North Pole, with general expectations being that the journey won't always be smooth, but that we are engaged in a hugely valuable learning process along the way. This article aims to share some of the design and decision making processes we've been developing and tell the story so far. The project's process is also being documented on a regular basis on Futurelab’s blog: flux.futurelab.org.uk/projects/fountaineers.

Initial workshops

At the beginning of the project we ran initial focus groups with teachers and pupils to agree a vision and a broad approach for the project, as well as establishing working relationships and responsibilities. Then in October 2006, as part of Luckwell's already established TALK (Thinking and Applying Learning Kinaesthetically) week, we held two days of exploratory design workshops with the whole school. We started with exercises to prove to the children that they were able to work together as a whole team to solve problems. In 'Super Sleuths' children worked in mixed age groups (5-11 years) and acted as tour guides for their school, telling their own stories - good and bad - about different locations in the grounds. This information was then turned into a huge mural which covered the walls of the sports hall. Children picked one or two locations that were important to them, and then communicated what they liked, what they didn't and what they would change. All pupils then had an opportunity to comment on these ideas, to make further suggestions and vote for their favourite ideas for change - with coloured stickers. Also in small mixed age groups the children brainstormed the pluses, minuses and interesting points of having a programmable fountain at school and began to externalise their ideas in diagrams, drawings, poetry, dance and digital art. From this initial work, we analysed the ideas and collated a list of recurring key themes - or values. Children wanted their fountain to be vandal proof, something that everyone could contribute to, to be representative of school, to use colour, to be fun, provide drinking water (or chocolate), to squirt people and to be environmentally sound.

These initial sessions were to kickstart the project and were very much led by Futurelab and Stakeholder Design. However, for a project like Fountaineers to have an impact on learning and to be sustainable in a school setting, it is crucial that ownership of the project and the responsibility for driving the progress moves from the external facilitator, to the staff and ultimately to the children themselves. Indeed, as the project progresses the school is beginning to take a greater share of the ownership with teachers working together to develop a 'Fountaineering Curriculum', incorporating the fountain into class work, and pupils and teachers researching different aspects of fountain design alongside the Futurelab team. Our role as direct facilitator of the design process is increasingly turning into a support role for the staff and as a broker - sourcing resources (designers, fountain engineers etc) as the children identify what they need.

Ongoing Fountaineering

After the initial workshops, staff were given the freedom to incorporate the fountain into their ongoing class work and there was a variety of fountain-related work - children wrote poems about fountains, designed logos and choreographed dances. In addition, the Fountaineering workshop groups came together once a week to produce a list of questions that needed to be answered, to discuss different ways they could communicate with one another, and to brainstorm different ways that they could make decisions.

Just before the Christmas break we ran workshops with all of the pupils, working in mixed age groups to begin to answer some of their questions. Up to this point, the children's thinking about the fountain design had been fairly literal - what it might look like and how it might 'act', or at best 'react', but not how it could be programmed to truly 'interact' with people and its environment. We selected some of the children’s questions (such as “how can we make the fountain dance?”) that gave us an opportunity to explore with them the interactive nature of the fountain - what it might do, why and when, if it was able to see, hear and feel - rather than what it might look like. Over the Christmas holidays the children were invited to draw or make a model that showed their vision of how the fountain would interact with the things around it.

Hands on - the ‘big squirt’, ‘roboteers’ and Digital Blue

It was apparent from the work that children did over Christmas that they didn’t yet have the understanding or the experience to think creatively about different uses for the fountain. The staff highlighted that we needed to move from talking about and drawing the fountain to enabling the children to experience, to manipulate things, to be active, to get wet. They needed to experience different inputs and outputs - they needed to learn for themselves how water might be propelled. As far as the children were concerned, at this point the fountain was just something that you talked about - it wasn't real. So over the month of January the children put on their wet water gear, and armed with squeezy bottles, water pistols and sprinklers experimented with different ways of propelling water.

They also researched, played with and role played being different sensors, inputs and outputs - to see how different sensors react to different inputs. To help with this and to familiarise the pupils with a visual programming interface, the LEGO Mindstorms robots 'Spike' and 'Tribot' were introduced to a small group of KS2 'Roboteers'. The original group of Roboteers have since shared their programming skills with their peers and the whole of Years 5 and 6 are now competent in controlling the robot - so much so that they have designed and implemented the 'Tribot Challenge', in which each group must program the bot to circumnavigate the wastepaper bin, finishing squarely on a piece of A4 paper. Four groups have successfully completed the challenge and the rest are determined to do so. Other children have taken it upon themselves to capture these events – recording them on handheld Digital Blue video cameras and editing the footage to upload the school website.

Decision making

As the project involves an entire primary school (208 children and 14 staff), we are developing new approaches to participatory design and decision making. It is important to ensure that everyone (from the youngest children to the teachers) has an equal input into the design and use of the fountain and yet we reach a coherent design that is feasible and flexible - without resorting to the bland 'safe' option due to a reliance on complete consensus.

Rather than telling the children how to make decisions, or worse, making decisions on behalf of them, teachers have been supporting the children to try out different ways to work out for themselves what works best in which situations and for what sort of decisions. In selecting a logo design, the children trialled various processes – hands-up voting, secret ballots, making comments on post-it notes, placing stickers and 'run around' voting - to see if they got the same result. With the logo they found one clear winner, but learnt that favouring a design doesn't necessarily come down to a 'yes' or 'no' answer. Sometimes you want to be able to take something from one design and combine it with another. They also learnt that some forms of voting are too susceptible to ‘peer pressure’ – with people voting for a particular idea, just because their friends are. As the children begin to realise that we are actually listening to them and taking their ideas and their concerns seriously - that they really are involved in the design of the fountain (and that there actually is going to be a fountain) - they in turn are thinking more deeply and thoughtfully about the decisions and suggestions they are making.

Since choosing a logo the children have had to decide where they want the fountain to be located. To help them decide we introduced Edward De Bono's ‘Thinking Hats’ to get them to consider each location from a variety of perspectives, and used this in conjunction with a ‘splash diagram’ in which each group rated a location on a set of criteria that they had developed (vandal-proof, everyone can see it, helps with learning etc) to develop a diagram represented in the form of a splash. The winning locations were the ones with the biggest splash. However, the children were not entirely happy with this as a decision-making tool and so the decision on the location was decided instead by an individual ballot.

A few thoughts for the future of Fountaineering

The future of the project is very exciting, teachers are increasingly embracing the vision of the project and are becoming more and more confident in letting the pupils explore and investigate the aspects of the project that most interest them.

Following a practical demonstration by a fountain engineer in conjunction with the roboteering and water play in the ‘big squirt’, the project is now real for pupils, and their thinking and ideas are becoming more and more developed and refined. Now that the Fountaineers have short-listed two possible locations for their fountain – one of which is mobile and one of which is fixed - they need to decide what they want it to be able to do and create a wishlist of functionality. Working with a designer and a fountain expert, they will need to weigh up the pros and cons of each option to ultimately agree and create a design brief for the fountain.

Going forward, we need to create more opportunities for pupils to try things out. If possible we need to give the children an opportunity to build a prototype fountain that they can reconfigure and experiment with – to find out what works and what doesn’t – to give them experiential, practical knowledge to feed into their final design brief.

One of the most difficult things seems to be making decisions ‘en-masse’. We need to work together to develop alternative strategies for making decisions, for combining design ideas and for deciding what is important across ages. How do we ensure that decision making enables a fair input by everyone and still gives accurate results? Some decisions are not black and white. Sometimes the use of stickers to vote for things you like is appropriate, but often it is too simplistic. We also need to consider age-appropriate mechanisms, for instance if we’re commenting on ideas in fountain designs younger children find it difficult to critically review the content of the drawing rather than the drawing itself.

We also need to evaluate the effectiveness of mixing up the children across key stages. The feedback on working in this way has been mixed from both children and adults. Whilst this has many benefits such as cross-age learning and mentoring, it may actually be that such a broad range of ages is only suitable for certain, practical activities rather than for group discussions and decision making, which can tend to be less inclusive for younger children.

The fountain is beginning to permeate everyday school life and is beginning to show small signs of changing things for learners. Although many of the children think it’s taking too long, the feedback on the project so far is really positive. Teachers are reporting a continuing buzz and engagement from pupils and are impressed by the quality of their fountain-related work. Children have reported that they love the opportunities to get out of the classroom, to work with people that are not in their class and to share their ideas across the school. Parents are also showing an interest – helping children with their fountain designs and research at home, and enquiring about the project at a recent parents’ evening.

With current debates about what a 21st century education should look like, Fountaineers is showing that children and teachers have enormous scope to influence the reconfiguration of their buildings and outdoor spaces - and the ways in which they learn.

For Futurelab it’s providing a focus for us to try out new ways of doing things – new approaches to creating educational experiences for learners (within a mainstream school), and an opportunity to show that outside spaces and natural environments entwined with new interactive technologies – and the co-design of them - have the potential to model new learning habits and create more adventurous, curious mindsets…

We expect the fountain to be in situ in Luckwell Primary School, Bristol by the summer of 2007.

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