Kristina Ohl
Project Spotlights
-
Testing the planning game with 4th, 5th and 8th grade students. I worked with local schools in the Boston area to test the prototype for my curriculum design and received feedback.
-
Shared the final project with Vivify STEM. I was featured in a blog post and was a guest on a podcast.
-
My curriculum was added as an official product and is now sold nationwide to teachers and parents through Teachers Pay Teachers and Vivify’s site.
Designing and Building a Sustainable House
Client
​
Harvard Graduate School of Education and Vivify STEM
​
Project Duration
​
10 Weeks
​
Materials
​
​
How can we help students identify as “real” scientists by involving them in meaningful sense-making activities? I hope to help students see STEM as more relevant to their lives by exploring a relevant topic in engineering and climate change: designing sustainable, eco-friendly homes. My project-based curriculum is intended to guide students through the engineering design process, a practical approach to solving problems.
This project was created as part of a semester-long course at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. The inspiration for my project came from an activity I did with my 6th grade students while teaching about Space. Students worked together to plan out and design colonies on Mars. The activity was downloaded from Vivify STEM, which creates low-cost, STEM-focused classroom curricula. I decided I wanted to “remix”, or re-create a project similar to this one, but with a different theme.
Designing by creating leads to deeper, more meaningful learning experiences. Sawyer (2014) writes that “students can only learn [deeper conceptual knowledge] by actively participating in their own learning”. This project facilitates students’ construction of their own conceptual understandings by empowering them as apprentices in a field. I wanted to help students make personal connections to what they are learning by making the learning in my project authentic to the work of actual engineers and building designers.
Today, teachers are pressured by a strong push for standardized assessment- which leads to surface-level learning for students focusing on rote memorization in siloed subjects. Students in schools today are robbed of the opportunity to learn how to recognize underlying mechanisms and practices that connect to all disciplines and to learn from the iterative processes of creation and reflection. My project is interdisciplinary, addressing topics in building science, financial budgeting and human impacts on the environment.
​
​
Empathy is the first step in design thinking, but often designers don’t really take the time to understand the people they are designing for. Designing this curriculum as a student at Harvard truly helped me put myself in the shoes of my students and reflect on both the challenges and benefits of self-directed learning. As a result, I designed my project to fully support students, because they are going through the same learning progressions that I myself experienced. I had the ability to make something my own. By doing that, I internalized my learning from my graduate school course in a way that I have rarely done in other classes for school. I hope to give my students who will engage with my project the same opportunity!