Last spring, three six-year-old students at Bricolage Academy in New Orleans used the school’s design thinking approach — plus cardboard, string, a pulley and a few staples — to build a five-foot-tall crane that could pick up an object and move it to another location. They displayed their creation at the New Orleans Mini Maker Faire alongside 3D printers, drones, and custom built bicycles created by grown up tinkerers.

“Creative problem solving — how we define innovation — runs through everything that we do,” the school’s leader and founder, Josh Densen, explained.

Densen said his students innovate in Bricolage’s “Innovation Classroom,” where they created their crane. They also innovate while they learn math, reading, science, and more.

Design thinking isn’t just for Bricolage’s students

The school’s teachers applied the same methodology they teach in their classrooms over the summer when they were preparing to move from the building where they started the school two years ago into their new building, a former Catholic School building.

The Bricolage faculty dedicated two days of summer training to solving problems — from how to run recess and school lunch to how to organize the teacher workroom — with a user centered, design thinking approach.

Teachers called students into school during the summer break to ask them about their experiences at and perspectives on recess. They developed some ideas and then brought students back to test ideas and observe the students as they simulated recess play.

“There was a logic to the way we’ve designed recess,” Densen explained. When the students arrived back at school last week, they found a recess area with three zones — one that is quiet where children can draw with chalk or read, a second that has a garden and toys, and a third with grass where they can be a little bit rougher.

Densen says the school still feels like itself in its new space, and he looks forward to seeing the students filling up the “blank canvas” the faculty has created.

“If you were to come here in a month or two, you would see the whole school would look alive,” he said. “Now it just feels alive.”