Learning Landscapes: Turning Trash into Educational Treasure

Photo By: Flickr/Project H Design www.projecthdesign.org

The other day I was fortunate enough to catch Dan Grossman on his lunch hour, somewhere between his full-time job as an industrial designer and his second full-time job spreading education tools around the world.

Dan is a project lead for Project H Design’s Learning Landscapes.   Project H is a non-profit that “supports, creates, and delivers life-improving humanitarian product design solutions.”  Project H organizes volunteer designers, engineers, and other people into local chapters around the world to tackle specific challenges through humanitarian design.  Some chapters are designing furniture for hospitals and schools; some are working with already popular products like Lifestraw and the Hippo Roller.

Dan met Project H Founder, Emily Pilloton, in September 2008 and shortly afterwards received an assignment from Kutamba School for AIDS Orphans in Uganda.  The project: develop an educational toy that makes mathematics fun for students -and make it sustainable.

In less than a year, Dan and his team based in New  York City have taken their basic concept, an outdoor grid of halved old tires, and turned it into an exceptional educational tool, and the basis for a network of educators. Below are a few exerpts from Dan and I's conversation.

What was your new idea?

There are a million different toys and games for learning [math] and they all involve colors and pieces and all these great things, but they all serve only their specific game, they are limited.  Beyond that, you have games like those by Leap Frog that are interchangeable, but the problem is that those are digital.  So we thought what if we could take the same principle as the digital games but make it all physical and tangible?  What if we could create a system that enables lots of different new games and provides a blank canvas for instructors to create games. 

We realized that if we gave teachers and students a grid, explained the constraints and a few ideas of what you could do with this grid, they can instantly come up with their own games.

Our innovation is a grid of old tires that can be made anywhere around the world.  It comes in 2 configurations 4x4 and 5x5 right now, once these tires are installed in these specific dimensions, they can be written on with chalk.  The games that are invented are what make it special, anyone can put tires in the ground, and we can teach you to how to use those tires.

What's an anecdote or story that has stuck with you from the process?

For our next phase of development, we called on the help of a lead design firm in California.  We were meeting with the lead designer and he says “"I’d love to see how this works, let’s set up a test at my kid's school?" We all realized this is a make or break moment and we went and set up the game at his kid’s school. We gave the teachers the instructions and sat back to watch.  I’ve never seen kids go wilder for a game.  The game they played is called “Match Me” with two teams running around the grid to find the correct answers on the tires.  The kids were running and shouting and so excited they didn’t want to stop playing.  I turned around and looked at the designer and he just had the biggest smile on his face.

What did you and your team learn from the process?

One of the things I've learned is getting feedback and giving instructions.  In industrial design we do a lot of analysis and research; doing that with educators and children was probably one of the most eye-opening experiences, getting kids interested, excited, and teachers on board.  We test in the US, in the Netherlands, we were trying to get as much feedback as possible, find out what games people liked, understanding what is going to work and what's not. When we first went to Uganda, we went in with rules in a rulebook to use and asked for feedback, but the children weren’t comfortable offering it, we had to find different ways to receive feedback from them.

What is your ultimate goal with Learning Landscapes?  Where are you in the process?

Our next phase is to create network of learning landscapes, we want to collect games from around the world, collate them into subjects and create an educational database online that will be linked to each school.   We test teacher's ideas for games as well.  We installed 4 landscapes in 1 school district in North Carolina and test different games at each location. It’s the teachers that make this possible, they are the ones that do so much of the work and come up with new ways to teach the kids.  They've already come up with games for geography, English, language, and we are going to trade them with the school in Uganda.  We are putting a new Learning Landscape in DR this summer so we hope to eventually have a network of educators creating, swapping, trading games across a network.

The point was to keep it as simple as possible because then everyone is on an equal platform.  Everyone has cell phones maybe but not everyone has an iPhone or a BlackBerry.  If we create a toy that's intricate and complicated there will have to be different versions for different places and how is that fair?  So we want something that is equal everywhere.

That being said, we are also in the process of creating other complimentary products like outdoor chalkboards and benches that can snap over the tire grid to turn the space into an outdoor classroom.  To keep the games special and entertaining for the kids, the teachers only let them play them during education time, but they would also like other ways to use the space as well.

What is a piece of advice you would share with someone hoping to do something like you are doing?

The best advice I could share is to stay motivated, to be adventurous and take risks.  Don't be afraid to do something out of your comfort zone.  Take on projects that move you on your own time, if you can’t do it for your full-time job.  If you aren't a designer, all the better.  In our chapter in NY, we have designers, financial people, educators, parents, etc. 

The other important piece is to always follow through because you are dealing with a delicate situation. These are real problems you are working with and real people. When you approach these projects people trust you, they welcome you and they open their lives to you.  It’s a real honor and so you have to be responsible to them and to the project and follow through.  In this industry, too often you see great, great projects fall to the wayside because of funding, politics, etc.  It’s too important to not be successful in.

Anyone can do this.   If you are interested, pursue it.  Also, if Project H is in your area, join, come to the meetings and join a chapter.