Innovative didactics at Oerestad Gymnasium based

on the Index Compass

Overview

- What is innovative learning? Why innovative learning?

- Presentation of The Index Compass

- Examples of realized educational programs:

- The Financial Crisis (social science)

- The Future City (nature geography and Danish)

Innovative learning

- Projects

- Developing creative and innovative skills

- The Students as project Managers

- Less strictly structured but still organized

Global challenges

Examples of the questions dealt with in innovative projects

- Health

- Sustainability

- Growing Cities

- Food Supplies

Why do we do that?

- Becoming global participants in the society - becoming change-makers

- Facing global challenges that exist in the era of globalisation and will persist

in the future

- Creating value for other people

- Creativity and innovation are essential skills in our future society

From global to local

- Global innovation means solutions for the entire planet - it is a lot to process

- Local innovation is far easier to develop

Radical / incremental

Radical innovation

Developing new solution never seen before meeting completely new user´s need

Incremental innovation

Far easier - using existing innovation and just refining it a bit more

Or projects inside the school-organization

- How to make the food in the canteen sustainable?

- How to instegate a serious and sober debate among the students on the

social media?

Index Design to Improve Life Education: The Compass

- To guide the students through the process of innovation

- The Compass offers a scafollded method

Four phases:

- PREPARE

- PERCEIVE

- PROTOTYPE

- PRODUCE

Professionalism - not kindergarden

- Innovation has to be based on theory and knowledge

- The students need a lot of knowledge in order to be able to

create solutions

- It’s a good idea to organize theory-courses ahead of the project

period

- Innovation activities require detailed long-term planning

Generation Debt

- Social science

- Problem: A lot of young people are

borrowing money in the bank

to afford a high level of consumption

Challenge: How to prevent and

minimize debt among young people?

Why do we have a young generation with a huge

private financial debt?

Theory:

-Financial crisis

-Household debts

-The economical circuit

-Economical goals

-GNP

-Financial politics

-Deregulation

Perceive-phase

Before the innovative project: 6 lessons studying theory (research, analyze,

acquiring knowledge)

The target user - focus on the target group

Important to relate challenges to target group needs in order to narrow the scope

of the problem and make sure that the design solution meet the need of the users.

Personas - target groups

Antropological methods: observation/ interviews

Knowledge-mapping / project plan

What are we

gonna find out?

Articles to

read?

Where to

researche?

Whom are we

asking?

Inside the team:

Who is

responable for

which tasks?

Time-schedule Notes /

Important

Prototype phase

Prototype phase - kick-off-brainstorming

Prototyping: Apps, campaigns, websites, events,

pamflets, games etc.

Produce: Branding the product

Across curricular project: The future city

The future city

Choose and examine a case which contains a problem related to future urban

planning

Subjects

-Danish (branding, convincing, communication)

-Nature geography (sustainabilities, food suplies, urban heat, rubbish disposal, air

pollution, urban planning)

Open space - prepare phase

picture

Extended brainstorm

Perceive-phase

- Reading

- Analyzing

- Interviewing

- Observating

Sum-up (feedback/ feedforward)

Important that the groups meet after each phase,

present the results of their work and give feedback

or feedforward to another group as well as the

teacher is giving the students feedback.

It is crucial that it isn’t an exam or at test,

but that the feedforward is directed to what

can be improved in the next phase.

A student exam-project

PERCEIVE-PHASE

The topics

The greenhouse-effect (nature geography)

- The advantages of bikecycle-riding (nature geography)

- The disadvantages of going by car (nature geography)

- Analyzing an existing Danish bike-campaign “Biking to Work” (Danish)

The innovative part of the project

- How can we take advantage from earlier bike-campaigns in order to create a

campaign that will improve bicycling radically in the city of Copenhagen?

SUM UP - advantages

- It is a way to motivate less engaged or perhaps less academic students

- It is a funny and varied way of learning

- The students have ownership to their projects

- The students learn to collaborate and built on others ideas

- The students are studying a topic in depth

SUM UP - challenges

- It takes a long time to prepare a detailed innovative programme

- The teacher will have to be very acurate and precise in her instructions

- Two educational facilitators provide a better programme and result

- The teacher doesn’t know the answers

- It’s a demanding way of learning because there are no routines / no fill in the

blanks