Retreat Reflection

by - September 05, 2016

The retreat for our first Fusion cohort is now behind us and we have all returned home to dry out, warm up and rest prior to our first official day back at school next week.  We spent 3 days and 3 nights at the Sasamat Outdoor Centre on Sasamat Lake just outside of Port Moody with the goals of getting to know each other, dusting off some of our math and science skills, learning about and practising design thinking and getting our feet wet with some digital fabrication concepts.

The retreat kicked off with our school's resident Improv Theatre guru, Ember Konopaki.   It was great to see the boys, many of whom knew each other fairly tangentially, jump in with both feet, take risks and laugh in the face of potential embarrassment.  Besides being an outstanding ice-breaker for the retreat, the boys practised thinking on their feet and learned about the power of suspending judgement and adding to the ideas of others.  The evening's activities really did do a great job of setting the stage for the rest of our days together and the year in general.

The next morning began with a Setting Agreements protocol that allowed us all to have a frank discussion about how we want our cohort to operate throughout the year.  The discussion surfaced the priorities of all of the members of the community (students and teachers) as we looked at what we valued and how those values would serve the work that we are about to set out to do.  As a teacher, I've done this protocol with a number of different groups and it was interesting to see how our Fusion cohort compared to previous groups.  The agreement "Have fun" almost always comes up and there is inevitably a discussion about whether having fun is something that we need to have in a list of agreements that we make with each other.  New for this group was a discussion of setting the group agenda ahead of the individual's and the idea of adopting a "Yes, and..." approach to everything.  The discussions around these agreements was enlightening and very productive!

Our illustrious Math teacher and avid board gamer, Jordan Forseth then took the group through a math-based challenge that had the boys brushing off previous year's math concepts, extending some new ones, running around the camp looking for clues and even, in true Die Hard fashion, "defusing a bomb."  It was a truly fun way of flexing the math muscles!  This was followed by an afternoon of low-ropes activities, swimming, archery and other outdoor games, all done under cloud cover and light rain (but no damp spirits!)

Catherine Holmen, our braniac astrophysicist/science teacher took the boys through a challenge in the evening that some of the boys just didn't want to stop working on.  The premise was that groups of the boys were stuck inside a space station (on one side of a bench.)  Using only three boards of various dimensions, and a length of rope, they were to retrieve a bowling ball from a milk crate a set distance away from the bench.  Of course, taking a "space walk" was not permitted, so they had to build some sort of structure that would allow them to accomplish their task.  We'd split the full group in two and both groups came to a simple, if not risky and inelegant solution relatively quickly.  They were then told that this was not the solution that the creators of the problem had come up with and they dove into trying to find a different solution.  Eventually, both groups did come up with the suggested solution, and one of the groups decided that they wanted to keep going to see if there were other solutions that might work!  The debrief after the exercise revealed a wealth of interesting ideas from how the physics of the suggested solution actually worked to what kinds of processes were used (or not used) to get each group to any solution.  It set the stage beautifully for the discussion of a design thinking model the next day.

The second full day was all about design thinking.  After looking at what worked and didn't work in the process of the previous evening's Space Arm challenge, we discussed a design thinking model and put it to work designing a new school cafeteria.  While none of the solutions revolutionized the way the world will look at student dining, the exercise and debrief was a great way to walk through and start to understand the step to coming up with a solutions to real problems.

The next challenge involved building aluminum foil boats that would hold a certain amount of weight.  This challenge was all about prototyping ideas and the concept that rarely is the first attempt at solving a problem the best one.  We also looked at what we learned from our failed attempts and how these failures accelerated our progress in coming to our final solution.

The final challenge of the day was the most defined with largest number of constraints.  The boys had to build a water tower that met a certain set of specifications.  While nobody met all of the constraints and one could argue that none of the solutions were "successful," the process was great fodder for a discussion about constraints, time management (one of the constraints) and how design/engineering work might look in real life. Of course, the day was also interspersed with recreation opportunities for the boys, in various configurations simply got to hang out with each other and get to know each other better.

The last day of the retreat was an earlier wake up as we had to get ourselves fed and out the door to a day at Makerlabs where we learned to use some of the digital fabrication tools that we have at our disposal now at the school.  The boys explored 2D design through Inkscape, 3D design through 123D Design, 3D printing and laser cutting.  This, coupled with a tour of the Makerlabs space to see what other fabrication tools could be accessed on future visits got the boys' imaginations flowing as they started to understand how different tools might be used to create different things over the course of the year.  All the folks at Makerlabs were fantastic and special thanks go to Maryam and Scott for working with the boys. 

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