#20Time for the First time: The Bad Idea Factory #GeniusFair2017

Wait what?

As I was working on preparing for this year's project, I gathered a ton of different resources to help me craft a semblance of a path toward a 20Time project.  One resource that I have found really valuable is 20time.org.  This website by Kevin Brookhouser takes it's readers step by step through the process with simple instructions, videos and reactions. 

One idea that he did with his class was the "bad idea factory".  I found this to be a really inspiring an fun idea to help students brainstorm their Genius Fair project.   So we re-created the scene with some variations. ​(Check out the outcome of the bad idea factory from 20time.org-->)

How it worked for us...with 8th graders

I always had it in the back of my mind that the bad idea factory would work.  The videos make it look easy, students are inspired, and ultimately these life changing projects will come from a pretty cool idea.

And then I remembered... we are working with 8th grade students. 

The maturity level, though similar, between 8th and 10th graders is quite a gap, and as teachers we started to see this in the bad ideas that were coming on our papers.  But I'm getting ahead of myself

Our 8th grade class is approx. 92 students. (I say approximately because within international school there is always an addition or subtraction)  Fortunately we have an "art gallery" aka big open space that we were able to use for the bad idea factory.  We used large pieces of butcher paper on 9 different tables to divide the students up.  I prepped them with a quick single message as a challenge, "What's the worst idea you can come up with?  We then had students divide on the tables and start writing.  Every 6 or 7 minutes we would have the students switch tables so that they would see other's bad ideas, which would inspire MORE bad ideas.  Again Bad Idea FACTORY.

In the end, we didn't have enough time to set up the gallery (which I will talk about later in this post), and the students left the remnants of their bad ideas all over the the once clean butcher paper. 

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Our Students are really Bad at bad ideas...

This was an interesting encounter for all of us involved.  Our students were really bad at bad ideas.  That might sound like a bad play on words, but as students were beginning to work through this factory idea, they struggled with the ability to come up with bad ideas.  So what we did is unleashed the teachers on the papers as well and allowed them to write down bad ideas to inspire the bad ideas.  In the end, you can see our results, but it was an interesting beginning to what was assumed to be a easy, stream of consciousness activity.

Some of the Results of the Bad Idea Factory

Next steps toward #GeniusFair2017: Bad Idea Gallery

The next question we had to tackle was:
"How to we take all of these bad ideas and inspire students to have really good ideas?"

​The answer was not totally clear, but we had the information and the willingness to try something and see where it would take us!  This is one characteristic of this teacher team that I am really thankful for.  We are essentially stepping of an educational cliff, like Wylie coyote, with great intentions, but a clear lack of experience to succeed.  And yet we push forward, knowing full well at the end of the day, what we learn is far more important than what expectations are met.

Enough of the feels...back to the process.

The bad idea gallery was simply a gallery walk of all of the bad ideas that were written down.  Students were given a brainstorming tool that we created that would help them filter their good ideas and then go deeper with the great ones. (See the sheet here).  

Overall, this process has been an interesting one.  I feel like we are trying to go to California by driving through Beijing.  I believe this process is going to surprise us though.  Ultimately I remind myself that the teachers I work with and the students that are going through this process are way more intuitive and creative than we give them credit for.  And because of that, our #GeniusFair2017 is going to be epic! 

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Coming Next time:  Students Pitch to get their projects approved