STUDENT PORTAL - Service

🌍 Service Learning (PK–12)

Service learning helps students grow as compassionate leaders by connecting classroom learning to real-world action. These resources support teachers, parents, and students in practicing empathy, building community, and engaging in projects that make a difference.

💡 Foundations of Service Learning

National Youth Leadership Council (NYLC) — https://www.nylc.org/
KIDS Consortium: Service Learning Resources — https://kidsconsortium.org/
Learning to Give (Lesson Plans & Activities) — https://www.learningtogive.org/
Edutopia: Service Learning — https://www.edutopia.org/topic/service-learning

👶 Early Childhood & Primary (PreK–4)

PBS Kids: Explore Kindness & Helping — https://pbskids.org/learn/when-something-scary-happens/helping-others/
Random Acts of Kindness Foundation (K–5 Activities) — https://www.randomactsofkindness.org/for-educators
GenerationOn (Service Projects for Kids) — https://www.generationon.org/
CharacterStrong: Elementary Activities — https://characterstrong.com/

👩‍🔬 Middle School (Grades 5–8)

DoSomething.org (Youth-Led Campaigns) — https://www.dosomething.org/us
Roots & Shoots (Jane Goodall Institute Projects) — https://rootsandshoots.org/
Youth Service America (Middle Level Projects) — https://ysa.org/
iCivics: Civic Engagement Activities — https://www.icivics.org/

🎓 Academy (Grades 9–12)

United Nations Volunteers: Youth Opportunities — https://www.unv.org/become-volunteer/youth
Global Youth Service Day (High School Service Projects) — https://www.gysd.org/
Project Green Schools — https://projectgreenschools.org/
National Service-Learning Clearinghouse — https://gsn.nylc.org/

✨ Creativity & Reflection Tools

Canva for Service Project Posters — https://www.canva.com/education/
Flip (Microsoft) for Reflection Videos — https://info.flip.com/
Padlet for Project Journals — https://padlet.com/

From Stanford University's Hasso Plattner Institute of Design (aka: the d.school); a place for explorers and experimenters.

Project Worksheet

The Institute was founded by Stanford mechanical engineering professor David M. Kelley, six other professors and George Kembel in 2004. The program integrates business, law, medicine, the social sciences and humanities into more traditional engineering and product design education.

"We believe everyone has the capacity to be creative. The Stanford d.school is a place where people use design to develop their own creative potential." - David M. Kelley

Conduct Interviews
Uncover Emotions
Seek Stories

The Empathize mode is the work you do to understand people, within the context of your design challenge. During this stage, we are working with users a lot. Observing what people do and how they interact with their environment gives you clues about what they think and feel.

Sometimes a good conversation can surprise both the designer and the subject by the unanticipated insights that are revealed. View users and their behavior in the context of their lives.

Prepare some questions you’d like to ask, but expect to let the conversation deviate from them. Ask someone to show you how they complete a task. Have them physically go through the steps, and talk you through why they are doing what they do. Ask them to vocalize what’s going through their minds as they perform a task or interact with an object.

Have a conversation in the context of someone’s home or workplace – so many stories are embodied in artifacts. Use the environment to prompt deeper questions.

reframe and create human-centric problem statements
identify meaningful and surprises and tensions
infer insights

The Define mode of the design process is all about bringing clarity and focus to the design space. The goal of the Define mode is to craft a meaningful and actionable problem statement – this is what we call a point-of-view.

The Define mode is sense-making. It results in your point-of-view (POV): the explicit expression of the problem. The Define mode is also an endeavor to synthesize our findings into insights.

The final point-of-view has to combine these three elements – user, need, and insight – as an actionable problem statement that will drive the rest of your design work.

A good point-of-view is one that:

Provides focus and frames the problem
Inspires your team
Informs criteria for evaluating competing ideas
Empowers your team to make decisions independently in parallel
Captures the hearts and minds of people you meet
Saves you from the impossible task of developing concepts that are all things to all people

brainstorm radical ideas
build on others' ideas
suspend judgement

Ideate is the mode of the design process in which you concentrate on idea generation. We ideate in order to transition from identifying problems to creating solutions for our users.

Particularly early in a design project, ideation is about pushing for a widest possible range of ideas from which you can select, not simply finding a single, best solution.

Techniques like Brainstorming, affinity diagram can be used. After collecting as many ideas as you could, ask the team to vote. Two or three ideas that receive the most votes we forward into prototyping.

The determination of the best solution will be discovered later, through user testing and feedback.

create lo-res objects and experiences
role play to understand context and key feature
quickly build to think and learn

The Prototype mode is the iterative generation of artifacts intended to answer questions that get you closer to your final solution. In these early stages, you should create low-resolution prototypes that are quick and cheap to make (think minutes and cents) but can elicit useful feedback from users and colleagues.

A prototype can be anything that a user can interact with. A wall of post notes, a gadget you put together, a role-playing activity, or even a storyboard.

Don’t spend too long. The point of the stage is to answer a particular question. The prototype should be built with the user in mind.

Join our class AILX481Z6

Getting Started Tutorial

Tinkercad for 3D printing prototyping

Thingiverse for shared 3D designs

test with customers to refine solution and gather data
gain deeper empathy
embrace failure

The Test mode is when you solicit feedback, about the prototypes you have created. Show them to your users and have another opportunity to gain empathy for the people you are designing for.

Ideally, you can test within a real context of the user’s life. Try to create a scenario in a location that would capture the real situation. Listen to what they say about it, and the questions they have.

guidelines for evaluating project work critically
openly giving and receiving feedback
integrating feedback

Design Thinking is an emergent problem solving process filled with emergent techniques, skills, and processes to learn. This prompts us to look at assessment as a prototype. Since each project by design is different and unpredictable, our focus is more on giving students feedback about the process. Also, we hope that these rubrics will educators frame design challenges and develop new tools for capturing student progress.

Process Goals: Students will develop a strong understanding of design process stages and tools and be able to reflect on the process in order to solve real problems that effect their lives.

Communication Goals: Students will develop the skills to create effective teams and communicate complex ideas clearly within a team and to a larger audience and garner support from their community.

Risk Goals: Students will develop the mindset that failure is a necessary part of the design process and they will not shy away from ideas and processes that do not have a dependable outcome.

any and all steps can be repeated
the process is not necessarily linear
apply as needed

Iteration and making the process your own

Iteration is a fundamental of good design. Design Thinking is an iterative process. You may pivot between stages. And it does not mean failure. Pivoting between modes can create a better solution for our users.

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