One sentence summary: A helpful summer camp focus on developing useful soft skills for student aged from 16 to 22. I design the each day camp content and activities based on skills that I want students to have.
Key words: Soft-Skills, Vacation Camp, Domain-general knowledge, 12-22 years old, Chinese students
Origin of the project:
Initially, I had three ideas and was hesitant about which one to dig deep to be my final idea. Since when I was in highschool and college, I really want such a camp to help me better suit the college life or workplace networking and I also wrote my HPL DP about this summer camp, I finally decide to pick this idea among the three ideas.
COURSE DESIGN PROTOTYPE:
| Week1:collaborate and lead | Week2: Solve and Create |
| Monday: Ice-breaking activity + Form a group of 5 and everyone will be a leader once for 5 different team works + Relaxing Event Tuesday: Prepare for the given topic to deliver a speech as an individual(personal topic for students to better know each other) Wednesday: Deliver the speech and form a group of 4 to prepare for the debate. Thursday: Debate preparation+ Debate Competition + Relaxing EventFriday: Outdoor team game day Weekend: Field Trip or Camping (team building + informal learning) | Monday:SEL courses+ Do the Role Play in a group with role exchange to train the empathy ability+Movie Night(SEL related) Tuesday: Make Friends Activity: Find someone you are not familiar in this classroom to make two new friends + Relaxing Event Wednesday: Making a creative video/poster/podcast/drawing to introduce your team Thursday: Real Life Problem Solving Friday: Real Life Problem Solving + Presentation |
| public speech, critical thinking, leadership, team work | Creativity, teamwork, SEL training |
Coming my personal experience, I think learning design now is like constructing a building from drafting to final build. During drafting stage, you need to revise your plan continuously to better prepare for the final actual conduction. The more perfect your draft is, the easier for you to follow the constructing process.
Also, I think learning design is similar to planning a start-up company. You need to have your “business plan” aka “course design outline” and talk to many people to revise your plan. Moreover, you need to analyze your audiences carefully just like to know the market demand. Overall, if your learning design is excellent, you can make a profit based on it
After reflecting so many times on the question “What is learning” design, I realize that learning design is a process that we continuously find problems and solve them by various methods. Specifically, we can do market research online, interview the target audiences, discuss with classmates, and compare with other similar competitors. Each method provides us a new way to think about our project and insights about how we can move forward. Therefore, as a learning designer, I feel like I am like a person with multiple hands and grabbing all the useful things around me to make my product more refined.
