Wednesdays@TFI Program Wins National Prize
The Wednesdays@TFI program, created by The Franklin Institute specifically for SLA, recently won 2nd place nationally in the Industrial Designers Society of America (IDSA) Design Learning Challenge. The prize was awarded to school and museum programs that effectively integrated design thinking into K-12 curricula. In this unit, planned by Franklin Institute staff and the very creative Phil Holcombe at PlusUs (a design and education consultancy), one group of students was tasked with choosing an interesting area of STEM and teaching it through an exhibit of their own design. They worked with The Franklin Institute's exhibit design/prototyping team and went behind the scenes to see how it's done. Through successive iterations of inquiry and research, the students created new exhibit concepts and prototypes, and presented their ideas to the exhibit design/prototyping team for feedback.
