Back to School

posted by Bruce Dodge on December 14, 2011 in Community Involvement

Last Friday, Barb Wells, our VP of Architecture, and myself had the chance to spend the day at Indian Springs Middle School in Columbia City, In.  We worked with the 8th grade math students as they worked on a restaurant design the project.  There project is a part of a Project Based Learning program being piloted at the school.  This learning style teaches students math skills through application to real life scenario.

Barb’s expertise in the subject of restaurant design really helped the students connect what their teachers had been telling them with real world issues that an architect must incorporate into their floor plans.  She spent time with each of the 6 classes reviewing an actual Applebee’s floor plan and applying the criteria they used in their layouts to her real drawings.

Following Barb’s presentation, we got to interact on an individual level with each group.  They explained their design to us, asked for  feedback on their concepts,  and at times gave us the opportunity to review our basic math skills.  It was great to see these kids really working to build creative designs and be very concerned about including real criteria into their plans.  They were learning geometry, scaling principles, fractions, percentages, team work and problem solving without even knowing it.  We heard several comments about the project being much more fun than “doing work.”

Being able to spend the day both seeing the energy in the kids and being able to contribute to their learning and development was truly a very rewarding and fun experience.

It was also good to see that with the increasing rate of change we all experience, some things continue to be consistent.  In over 30 years, school lunches haven’t changed at all!