Abstract

For over twenty years we have run a summer enrichment program for high school students of exceptional potential at the University of Waterloo. With a focus on technology and entrepreneurship, and a purpose to present these students with challenges beyond their school experience as a means to better realizing their high potential, we have built the program around an intensive three week design project. The design process gives them a framework for addressing the open ended problems of the outside world rather than the closed exercises of the classroom. We discuss our experience with the teaching of design in this unique setting. In recent years we have hit on a particularly effective opening for the three week experience: a three day “designer boot camp”. We open by introducing the charette model as a means to focus on issues and stakeholders to develop a thorough definition of the problem at hand—using a sample problem drawn from their first day experience with a university residence cafeteria. We move on with a session on user-centred design. On Day Two we concentrate on skills for effective design teams including group work, creativity, idea generation, decision making, and prototyping. Day Three is devoted to a reprise of the charette experience, this time addressing the actual project theme for the year—the last two years we’ve used “The Great Canadian Energy Challenge” and “Zero-Waste Design”. We discuss earlier strategies and exercises that became the foundation of designer boot camp and compare our impressions of our students’ experiences.