“Humans have just landed on an alien planet and they’ve staked out an area for their first city, City X. They need inventions that solve challenges relating to health, safety, communication, transportation, and more. These inventions are to be created by a vast team of young designers all around Earth.” This is the story that students, aged 8 to 12, are presented with during their three day 3D printing and problem solving workshop, the City X Project. As the City X curriculum is downloaded for free by teachers around the world, classrooms can begin learning critical thinking while they gain new design tools. The curriculum has already been used in the US, Lebanon and Hungary, but, most recently, this prototyping and 3D printing workshop has made its way to Singapore.
The students of the City X workshop are each assigned their own characters with specific problems in establishing a colony on an alien planet, ranging from lack of sunlight to unsanitary drinking water. The first day of the class involves brainstorming solutions to these problems, while the second day is reserved for prototyping their solutions using clay, paper, and other accessible, low-tech tools. Finally, on day three the students get to design their solutions in CAD and print them on Cube 3D printers from City X sponsor 3D Systems. These designs are uploaded to a community site where any City X student can download them, as means of connecting students across the world. All the while, the students are thought to be developing empathy with the character for whom they’re problem solving. The students in Singapore certainly seem to be enjoying the workshop, gauging from the video below:
In Singapore, City X and its parent organization, IDEAco, have partnered with Clanworks, a for-profit organization in the area. By partnering with Clanworks, City X hopes to spread their curriculum further with Clanworks training teachers in the use of the City X curriculum. Though Clanworks is a for-profit, the City X Design Thinking Toolkit, which consists of everything necessary to teach a City X workshop except for the 3D printers and filaments, will still be free. At the same time, City X is hoping to pursue similar partnerships in other parts of the world, where they can train organizations to train teachers to train students to solve problems through 3D printing. As Matthew Straub, Communications Director of the City X Project, explains at the Cubify blog:
When members of our team travel to train a regional partner, we’re able to go far beyond explaining the goals and ideas behind the City X Project in person. We’re able to relay teaching tips, share details about our experiences, answer questions, and, of course, facilitate or provide feedback on a workshop locally. This enables our partners to continue to facilitate the City X Project workshop locally, whether for profit or not. As an ever-improving workshop, it also allows us to test and collect feedback of our curriculum in a greater variety of educational, geographic, and cultural contexts.
This approach to licensing the curriculum around the United States and abroad is an avenue to empower as many kids as possible with the tools and processes necessary to make, solve problems, and get their hands on 3D modeling and 3D printing technologies.
I’m a fan of the game-based, problem solving approach to the City X curriculum. There’s no reason why school shouldn’t be fun, while simultaneously teaching valuable critical thinking skills. I do have a few reservations, as I’m slowly turning into an old biddy. Though the gamification is cute, possibly essential, to the curriculum, I don’t see why the students couldn’t apply their nascent problem solving skills to the actual environment around them, as is occurring at the Renbrook School in Connecticut where students are repairing the school itself. I’m also a bit wary of the for-profit partnerships being established by City X, which sort of smack of school privatization. Why not train public school teachers or nonprofits to do what they’re training for-profits to do?
I’ll try to reserve my reservations until learning more about the program. For now, I do see it as a sort of fun way to combine three of my favorite things: education, 3D printing, and the colonization of alien worlds.
Source: Cubify
