Design Process at GAP School

Plan, Create, Investigate, Evaluate, Share. Or is it Investigate, Plan, Create, Share, Evaluate? Or maybe Share, Investigate, Plan, Create, Evaluate? These are the different steps of our design process at GAP for our Learners during projects. Historically, we might have created a design form for Learners to follow but the more we lean into what a learning experience is like for each individual the more obvious it becomes that everyone's design process is unique. Some might investigate different project ideas using the books in our projects library to start or they share an idea with an Educator which leads to plans and research. What's most important to our school culture is that we are engaged in a thinking and designing process. How that process unfolds is up to the individual.

Projects, started the year by working through several all group projects and slowly worked our way through the different elements of the design process. We looked at images of the notebooks of famous engineers & artists like Edison, DaVinci, and Dali to observe different examples of a design process. However, all of these famous notebooks shared the similarities of plans, sketches, evaluation of ideas, etc. As the year unfolds we hope to see Learners refining their own process as they fill out their project notebooks to create, plan, investigate, share and evaluate....or should we create first?