Making it Up

Experience had taught me that when facing a vast array of unknowns, one must start by defining the knowns and work from there.

I knew that a term was eighteen weeks long. Those weeks could be divided into units of different lengths – typically two, three or six weeks long. During the previous year we ran two sprints: a six-week unit and a three-week unit.

I also knew that when talking about innovation, we often talked about different ways of thinking. There was Process Thinking. There was Systems Thinking. There was Design Thinking. Creative problem solvers need these three core skills.

With only a few days before classes were to start, we roughly framed out the class: three units, each six weeks long, focusing on one of those areas of thinking. If we started with process thinking, we could leverage the experience of the previous year, using CS First, the computer science curriculum developed by Google.

That would buy us a few weeks before we had to figure out what we were going to do for the next unit.

And off Patrick went.

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