Blessed Sacrament School Welcomes CM's Design Thinking Workshop
Seven CM upperclassmen visited Blessed Sacrament to host their Design Thinking workshop on Wednesday morning.
Walpole, Mass.— Thirty-two middle school students from Blessed Sacrament School began their day with a challenge unlike any other when seven Catholic Memorial School upperclassmen visited Walpole to host their Design Thinking workshop on Wednesday morning.
Upon handing each middle-schooler a two-by-one-inch paper flag, the group of CM juniors and seniors prepared their own self-made exercise straight out of CM’s Innovation Lab. Their goal for the middle schoolers? For them to devise an escape plan from the top of a model Eiffel Tower to its base. How? By creating a paper-rope long enough from their single miniature flag.
Good luck.
“A fundamental rule in all design engineering is that there’s always a better way, or method, to achieve a goal,” said CM senior James Dumornay, a Roslindale native who joined Colton Keough, Ethan Powers, Sebastien Henault, John Shea, Tyrone Robinson, and Daniel Habermas on the trip to Blessed Sacrament.
“Through this technique, I’ve learned to challenge my thinking past my first idea. It’s cool to utilize skills you’ve learned in the classroom and to help whenever you’re outside of it too.”
Led by CM’s Director of Innovation Mr. Patrick Murray, the students introduced their innovation design methods from Mr. Brad O’Brien’s CM Design Engineering course to Blessed Sacrament’s sixth, seventh, and eighth grade science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) courses.
Mr. Murray forged a connection with Blessed Sacrament last year at the Massachusetts Science Technology Engineering and Math Summit. There, he met Mr. Rob Hall, Blessed Sacrament’s Director of Instructional Technology. The two shared the same vision. They both discussed how CM and Blessed Sacrament aimed to use innovation and applied learning across different disciplines within their respective curriculums.
At the time, Blessed Sacrament already shared a similar academic philosophy to CM’s project-based learning initiative. In accordance with their STREAM initiative, Blessed Sacrament encourages students to analyze the intersections between science, technology, religion, engineering, arts, and math. The program fosters critical thinking skills, tackles real-world problems, and evaluates cross-discipline findings at the middle school level.
From this STREAM initiative, Blessed Sacrament consolidated its own STEM course into a single period. Such a course combines math and science into a single course instead of offering the two separately.
Inspired by the school’s STEM mission, Mr. Murray organized his own Design Thinking workshop for the sixth, seventh, and eighth graders at Blessed Sacrament. Students from his Robotics class assisted in creating the workshop using designs from CM’s Innovation Lab. It proved such a success that Blessed Sacrament invited CM back again this year.
This time around, each Blessed Sacrament student needed to collaborate and create their own way to accomplish the tasks at hand.
Upon handing each middle-schooler a two-by-one-inch paper flag, the group of CM juniors and seniors prepared their own self-made exercise straight out of CM’s Innovation Lab. Their goal for the middle schoolers? For them to devise an escape plan from the top of a model Eiffel Tower to its base. How? By creating a paper-rope long enough from their single miniature flag.
Good luck.
“A fundamental rule in all design engineering is that there’s always a better way, or method, to achieve a goal,” said CM senior James Dumornay, a Roslindale native who joined Colton Keough, Ethan Powers, Sebastien Henault, John Shea, Tyrone Robinson, and Daniel Habermas on the trip to Blessed Sacrament.
“Through this technique, I’ve learned to challenge my thinking past my first idea. It’s cool to utilize skills you’ve learned in the classroom and to help whenever you’re outside of it too.”
Led by CM’s Director of Innovation Mr. Patrick Murray, the students introduced their innovation design methods from Mr. Brad O’Brien’s CM Design Engineering course to Blessed Sacrament’s sixth, seventh, and eighth grade science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) courses.
Mr. Murray forged a connection with Blessed Sacrament last year at the Massachusetts Science Technology Engineering and Math Summit. There, he met Mr. Rob Hall, Blessed Sacrament’s Director of Instructional Technology. The two shared the same vision. They both discussed how CM and Blessed Sacrament aimed to use innovation and applied learning across different disciplines within their respective curriculums.
At the time, Blessed Sacrament already shared a similar academic philosophy to CM’s project-based learning initiative. In accordance with their STREAM initiative, Blessed Sacrament encourages students to analyze the intersections between science, technology, religion, engineering, arts, and math. The program fosters critical thinking skills, tackles real-world problems, and evaluates cross-discipline findings at the middle school level.
From this STREAM initiative, Blessed Sacrament consolidated its own STEM course into a single period. Such a course combines math and science into a single course instead of offering the two separately.
Inspired by the school’s STEM mission, Mr. Murray organized his own Design Thinking workshop for the sixth, seventh, and eighth graders at Blessed Sacrament. Students from his Robotics class assisted in creating the workshop using designs from CM’s Innovation Lab. It proved such a success that Blessed Sacrament invited CM back again this year.
This time around, each Blessed Sacrament student needed to collaborate and create their own way to accomplish the tasks at hand.
“The challenges prompt students to rapidly brainstorm, prototype, and test their solutions before analyzing their work and improving on it,” said Mr. Murray.
“It highlights the iterative design process taught in Mr. O’Brien’s class.”
The Eiffel Tower exercise sounded simple enough. A few folds of the paper flags here-and-there. Some cuts along the edges. Before they knew it, the middle school kids crafted their own escape routes to the tower’s base.
However, Mr. Murray smiled. He knew his students kept another layer to the challenge up their sleeve. Gesturing to the classroom door 30 feet away, the CM students followed suit. They told the students to extend their paper ropes all the way to the doorway.
To nobody’s surprise, the middle school students met the challenge head-on.
Their uneven paper trails spilled into the Blessed Sacrament hallway, outlining a straight path into the classroom of tomorrow.
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