Steve Randall’s computer science technology class at Redmond’s Obsidian Middle School hosted a Shark Tank last week, a panel of judges helping steer student inventions aimed at helping their peers with disabilities navigate their way through school. It’s the second such program of the current school year, the first of which occurred in Bend at Pacific Crest Middle School and Bend Tech Academy last fall.
The High Desert Education Service District launched the Assistive Technology Makers/ Career Technical Education program in the 2019-2020 school year with the pairing of Obsidian Middle School and Ridgeview High in Redmond – just before in-person learning was interrupted by the COVID pandemic.
“Last year was a re-boot,” says High Desert Assistive Technology Specialist Wendy Burkhardt. “We had started in the fall of 2019 at Obsidian, then by March 2020 (just as the project was set to move on to the high school), it was the last moment before COVID.”
For each program session, students with disabilities from the participating school district discuss with the middle school ATM program students some of the specific challenges they face in navigating their school days. The tech students take the resulting ideas and create design prototypes for devices that could help make learning more accessible.
Once the students have completed their designs and presented them at the shark tank event, they may have another week to incorporate feedback from the panel before turning their projects over to their partner high school’s CTE class, in this case at Ridgeview High. “The goal is for students to use their design thinking skills on projects that will support their peers,” says Burkhardt. This year’s Obsidian students designed items including a no-spill cup, easy-grip utensils and a secure Chrome Book holder that fastens to a wheelchair for a student with Cerebral Palsy, and a tactile voice recorder and Braille-coded paint palette for a visually impaired student.
“These teachers were hand-picked because they had already gone through the Stanford University Design Thinking Process,” Burkhardt explains. “When we first tried this, in 2019, we had a teacher who was interested in the program but hadn’t taught the students that process. Because they didn’t have the prerequisite skills, we spent the first six weeks teaching those basic concepts before we could get into the Makers section. That was a learning opportunity for us. We now only select teachers who already have those precepts embedded in their teaching.”
When Burkhardt introduces the program to a new team of students, she first holds what she calls an “empathy day.” Students must practice tasks with impaired abilities, for example writing or typing while wearing oven mitts, or accessing school lockers while wearing a blindfold so they can’t see the numbers on the combination locks. Empathizing is the first of five learning style modes comprising the Stanford design process, which forms the foundation for the program curriculum – the others being to define, ideate, prototype and test.
On April 25 a team of the Oregon program’s middle schoolers presented their prototypes at a state conference in Salem. “It was the first time we were able to present a full curriculum to the conference,” Burkhardt said. “By summer our hope is to have the curriculum for both middle school and high school programs on the OER [Open Educational Resource] Commons website,” a national hub for educator resources.
Plans for expansion of the program throughout Oregon are already underway. “For sure we will have it at Caldera High School in Bend [in the fall],” said Burkhardt, “and we have reached out to teachers in Crook County as well as Redmond’s Elton Gregory Middle School and Redmond High.”
The ATM/CTE curriculum was co-created by Carey Kraybill, a design and modeling instructor at Pacific Crest Middle School; High Desert Education Service District’s Assistive Technology Department; and the district’s CTE/STEM programs – with start-up funding from High Desert’s innovation arm, i4Education. Burkhardt hopes the program will eventually expand to all of the school districts in Oregon.
This article appears in Source Weekly May 4, 2023.
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I love the concept of this Shark Tank program – encouraging students’ creative minds based on EMPATHY. What a wonderful concept and so very needed in today’s world. Programs like this give me hope that the children of today will survive and grow into caring, compassionate adults. Thank you High Desert Education Service District for your forward thinking!
Cynthia Crossman, Bend