Precious Cargo + Persistence
Over the last two weeks, the Amber Band has continued to explore human migration by designing and building a vehicle to safely transport us and the things we need to start a new life. This phrase "start a new life" has been a common one among the group as we research human migration, so we wanted to take some time to understand what that might mean to each of us.
To help us dig a bit deeper into this topic, each student chose a particular place in the world to research how humans have migrated to or from that region. In addition to their independent research, we had the opportunity to interview students at Hong Kong International School to hear their stories of migration. Because of the 15 hour time difference, we stayed overnight at school so that we could chat with students in Hong Kong during their school day.
We also got a chance to have an expert visit from human migration researcher, Alice Taylor. She asked students to consider how they might design a school for refugees. She also shared some powerful resources with the group, like the educational online game Against All Odds. The game is designed to show you what it feels like to flee a country. As you play, you have to try and start a new life in a different country after you've escaped conflict. The game is built on facts and short films, and comes from The UN High Commissioner for Refugees.
Each student considered the things they would need to start a new life—their precious cargo. Those things ranged from survival items like food and water to pets and card games. We built prototype vehicles to test on a small ramp to measure and graph each vehicle's speed, and approximate the speed of our final build. Gever visited for a guest lesson on vehicle safety and physics, and helped students start to transform their design into a vehicle big enough to test drive down Bernal Hill.
After many hours in the shop, each group followed up with Gever for a safety check on their vehicle build—all of the groups were sent back to the drawing board! Some needed to make steering revisions, others had to install brakes, while others struggled with structural problems. This set us all back, but no one was ready to give up. The whole group worked double time last week to try and meet our Friday deadline to race down Bernal Hill.
In the end, we didn't meet our deadline. However, this did give us the opportunity to have a conversation about persistence, and to learn from our mistakes and failures. Students reflected on questions like: How did we work towards our goal over the two weeks? How did we manage our time? What might we do differently next time? For many, they realized that working as one big team would have helped us meet our deadline. They also talked about strategies to help them get focused in the future. All this helped us prepare for the upcoming expression phase of the By Land Arc, as students will need to find ways to set their own goals, manage their time, and work towards making something epic!