Designing the Future with Students: Part 2
From Whole-School Dream to One-Classroom Pilot
In my last post, I shared plans for a cross-grade mapping project that would connect our school community to the broader D.C. region through environmental exploration, storytelling, and civic inquiry. While the original vision aimed to span K–12, our scope has shifted, and that’s okay.
This fall, we’re starting right here in my sixth-grade classroom.
With support from the Children’s Environmental Literacy Foundation (CELF), our students will walk our campus and surrounding neighborhood, mapping what they observe, noticing what matters, and asking how we might design more sustainable, just, or joyful places. But this time, they won’t just be gathering ideas on clipboards—they’ll be designing technology to help them do it.
Using App Inventor to Gather Student-Driven Data
One of the most exciting additions to this pilot is the integration of MIT App Inventor. Students won’t just explore environmental features, they’ll build apps that allow them to collect and analyze data themselves.
Using App Inventor, students will:
Create custom surveys to collect peer and community input
Build heat or access maps using simple logic models and UI
Experiment with AI extensions to interpret or filter results
Connect their findings to storytelling, civic voice, and design thinking
For example, some students may build an app to survey how people feel in different outdoor spaces. Others might track sun exposure or greenery to analyze microclimates. The key: they're making the tools they need to answer the questions they care about.
Learning With (Not Ahead Of) My Students
Here’s the truth: I’m not a programmer. App Inventor is new to me, too. And that’s part of what makes this powerful.
I’ll be learning alongside my students, documenting how I navigate the tool, debug my mistakes, and iterate on app features. I want students to see that tech fluency isn’t about knowing everything, it's about knowing how to figure things out.
Throughout the process, I’ll be sharing my own reflections, resources, and lessons learned. If you're also curious about how to bring App Inventor into a middle school classroom without a coding background, stay tuned—I’ll be posting updates.
Quiet Collaboration, Expanding Potential
While the pilot is centered in sixth grade, I’m not working alone.
I’m collaborating with our sixth-grade science teacher, and have begun quiet, informal partnerships with science teachers in other middle school grades. I'm also bringing in art, music, and tech educators who are curious about transdisciplinary opportunities.
For now, this is a low-profile, high-trust expansion, an open invitation rather than a directive. We’re seeing what resonates and grows naturally from student energy and interdisciplinary potential.
Why Transdisciplinary?
This isn’t just a science unit. It’s not just tech or social studies either. It’s a real-world problem, and real problems require layered thinking.
Science: Climate patterns, urban design, heat islands
English/Literature: Narrative writing, persuasive text, reflective journaling
Social Studies: Place-based inquiry, maps and power, civic engagement
Math: Data tracking, analysis, measurement, and visualization
Technology: App design, computational logic, AI
Each discipline gives students a different lens, and together, those lenses offer clarity.
What's Next
While this began as a vision for the entire school, it’s now a focused, living pilot—messy, exciting, and deeply student-driven.
Follow along here at Futurise-Edu as I share our progress, student reflections, tech builds, my own learning curves, and stories from the field. And if you’re an educator dreaming about what’s possible when you hand students the tools to investigate their world: I’m keeping the door open.
Come walk with us.
