Curricular Materials

BUILT TO LEARN! Redesigning Shelter: An Integrated Design Thinking/STEM Curriculum is a four-week program, in which students explore shelter-based design thinking challenges and STEM activities related to shelter. The curriculum focuses on the intersection between design thinking, STEM, and shelter. The foundation of the curriculum is an enduring understanding: students will develop the creative confidence to fail forward by building successful shelters using both STEM concepts and the empathy-driven design thinking process. David Kelley, the founder of IDEO and Stanford’s Hasso Plattner Institute of Design (d.school) describes creative confidence as “having the courage to take creative risks (and fail) and the knowledge that all of the ideas you create have value.” Likewise, a “fail forward” mentality refers to “the never-give-up attitude of being willing to fail early and often in order to learn as much as possible to produce the best possible solution through real experience.”

Download curriculum document (pdf) | Download supplementary presentation slides (ppt)

Published 2014