Shaping Cities, Shaping Lives

 

Shaping Cities, Shaping Lives: The A+STEM Summer Camp Journey

November 1 - December 23, 2024

In collaboration with the Texas Tech University College of Architecture and the College of Education, the Museum is proud to present this exhibition which presents the results from a STEM camp held in the Summer of 2024.

The College of Education and College of Architecture partnered to include a one-week summer camp for high school students from Coronado High, Frenship High, Lubbock High, and Talkington School for Young Women Leaders. Students were introduced to design thinking and how STEM and Architecture could contribute to our community being more humanity-centered and environmentally friendly. There were seven teams, each with one mentor undergraduate student at TTU and one high school student. They created their idea to redesign an underutilized urban space in Lubbock to be more human-centered and culturally rich. They applied STEM principles to select materials and design elements suitable for Lubbock.

The exhibition has 3-D models of each of the seven team’s concepts with descriptions. It will also include concept drawings, faculty feedback/interaction, behind-the-scenes photographs, quotes from the high school and TTU student participants, and a comment area for public interaction.

 

Camp Description, STEPS, Procedure 

1.        Project Description: To promote students’ design thinking and career interest in STEM and Architecture, we held a one-week summer camp for high school students in Lubbock to provide a vital engagement opportunity in designing community-based architectural installations. During the camp, students were introduced what design thinking is, how STEM and Architecture could contribute to our community more humanity-centered and environmentally friendly.   

 

2.        Camp Curriculum: The camp curriculum was designed to solve real-life problems by applying Design Thinking (DT). In particular, we guided participating high school students to think out of the box in tackling real-life problems through 1) Emphasizing with community members’ experiences and their challenges that can be addressed by new architectural designs, 2) Defining meaningful and actionable problems, 3) Ideating creative solutions to address those problems, 4) Creating a prototype model of their most feasible ideas, and 5) Testing their model to improve their design.