Andrew Lerario:
Really the Rocket Project was about hope because the idea was how can we do something perceptively incredibly difficult within a school, something that kids typically don’t study at this age because it’s perceived as being too challenging. You’re like, let’s do rocket science. And that’s what we did.

Alec Patton:
This is High Tech High Unboxed. I’m Alec Patton, and that was the voice of Andrew Lerario. Andrew was a co-founder of Blue Dot Education, but before that, he taught at High-Tech High for 16 years. Andrew did a lot of cool projects, but that one that he just mentioned was something special. His students designed and built metal rockets from scratch, which they launched from the Friends of Amateur Rocketry launch site in the Mojave Desert. The rockets went between 6,000 and 8,000 feet in the air and approached Mach 1.
To be clear, this wasn’t a specialist engineering course. This was just normal high school for these kids, and I should mention Andrew’s teaching partner, Adam Borek, who also led that project. In this episode, Andrew talks about his approach to designing and running projects with students. I find his approach exciting and inspiring, and I also find it kind of terrifying. I think you’ll get a lot from this conversation. Let’s get into it. The legend, Andrew Lerario is here, 16 years teaching at High Tech High, and we are here to talk about iterative project design. So the way you use it, what does iterative design mean? So

Andrew Lerario:
Iterative design to me is a way of beginning with something that is really small and easy to access. Something that is representative of the work that is to come. It allows kids to participate in something. So for example, if we were doing a project that was around, let’s just say skateboard building, and we want to kind of get kids to participate in the community of practice of engineering, computer assisted design stuff, building a skateboard, a lot of that stuff is high end stuff. And to get there, how are we beginning? What are we starting with? So I would have them make a tech deck or play around in Tinkercad or do something that is really accessible and have them kind of work through some of those kinks along the way.
They’re reflecting, they’re documenting, they’re speaking about, they’re sharing, they’re communicating, they’re learning. We’re having class sessions where we’re identifying the values within this space. So it’s not kind of like this narrow set of values in a learning space that has been defined before we even get into there. So the kids have no place to contribute or participate in that community. It’s about kind of creating a space where that can all emerge from the process of going through there. So the first iteration is something easy, quick, very fast, very rapid, something that can then be done again, usually within the first two week I like to get through two, three iterations of something.

Alec Patton:
Is that skateboard project something you actually did?

Andrew Lerario:
I’m developing it right now actually for an afterschool program in the South Bay Area. A lot of them are interested in skateboarding, so I was thinking, how might I roll this out in a way that can rapidly in an afterschool space where kids have already spent a day in school, get at it and get working.

Alec Patton:
Can you give an example of this in a project that you did?

Andrew Lerario:
Sure. I did a rocket project here at High Tech High. We started on the first day where the iterative design actually kind of goes back to this idea of sharing the cognitive load. I think teachers try to think of all the outcomes in a project that are going to happen and they try to wrestle with that and then think of all the different things that come up in a project, how might we have an answer? And I think the idea of sharing the cognitive load is that you don’t have to have an answer. You can work with kids and as the project unfolds, things are going to emerge that end up answering some of the things you were wrestling with. And so I should just did this rocket project. I don’t know how to build big rockets, but that was the goal. So as an adult learner, I engaged with the kids and I said, what can we start with?
Well, let’s just start with paper rockets. And the first day we just rolled up some paper rockets, we put them on a tube, had it connected to a two liter bottle that we stomped on. And from there they came up with ideas. Well, what if we actually make a pressurized launcher? So we did that. What do we learn about rockets? After the first time that every kid launched a rocket with minimal instruction, I think that’s important for the first iteration is give them a space where they can get used to engaging from an intuitive creative space.

Alec Patton:
Why is that minimal instruction important?

Andrew Lerario:
Because I think it’s good to have kids be asked to rely on their intuitive creativity when they engage with something. So that becomes an unset expectation in the work that you’re not going to be told what to do and how to do it. You are going to be giving a creative capacity within this work, and we want you to exercise that and we want you to speak to that in the end so that your voice is valued, your creativity is valued, and we’re augmenting kind of what is valued within the community that we’re building.

Alec Patton:
And when kids are building paper, stomp rockets with minimal instruction. What’s your kind of broad expectation of how many of those are going to be functional?

Andrew Lerario:
I think maybe if you get a couple of them functional out of the whole thing, even if one is functional out of the whole thing, it gives you an ability to kind of set them up. Say for example, you could do a gallery walk after that or kids took a video of them all. You watched them all, which ones worked? Which ones didn’t? Can we put ones that kind of performed similarly together and look at what are the designs that contributed to it? And then we start to wrestle with those ideas. So you start to converge through the experience towards design principles for this work.

Alec Patton:
For people who aren’t familiar with the term, what is a gallery walk?

Andrew Lerario:
So that would be at the end of doing an experience or building something and testing it out, you set up all the work and everyone gets a chance to kind of roam throughout the room and identify things within the work that you’re looking at through a lens for the project, or you’re giving feedback on the work for people to kind of get feedback and look at it. So it kind of takes all the work that’s happened in the classroom and puts it out in the gallery so that it’s shared to the entire community rather than just being given back to the teacher.

Alec Patton:
As these kids are walking around looking at their peers’ paper rockets, how do you scaffold that? What are you telling them to look for as they walk through that space? What instructions are you giving them?

Andrew Lerario:
We’re starting with just feedback because I think there’s a lot of things within that creative space that kids put into their work that they’d like to get feedback on. So we have them prepare their work with questions that they might want answers on so that the students that are roaming around can give that feedback.

Alec Patton:
So the kids are literally responding to the questions. So if I make my rocket that sort of breaks and doesn’t really do that much, and then I set it down and then I jot down some questions for kids to respond to as they come around and look at it?

Andrew Lerario:
But there might be some aesthetics work in there. What do you think about this? What is the thing that you’re most proud of in the rocket, and what do you want to get feedback on? Or what is something you might want to help with? As you go through multiple iterations, it becomes more focused. Kids get used to that process and they tend to respond to it more. And they even start operating within the building process and the design process knowing that’s going to come. And so it shifts kind of their dispositions towards the work. And as you go through this iterative process.

Alec Patton:
So was the second iteration another improved paper rocket or were you moving on?

Andrew Lerario:
Yeah, it was, let’s do this one again that day. Let’s do it again. Which ones worked? Which ones didn’t work? What are the characteristics of the ones that we saw that did work? How are we implementing them in our designs? And then you start getting into some of the deeper questions. Why is it working? And then it’s like, okay, now we can start looking at the math, the physics. We can start looking at how we can intentionally design better models moving forward. And eventually we got into kit build rockets that we were building from scratch with wrapping paper around tubes and gluing it. We were building our own motors.

Alec Patton:
When you say kit, to me as a non rocket scientist, that sounded like a contradiction in terms that it was a kit built rocket that you built from scratch. Wouldn’t it be one of the other?

Andrew Lerario:
Yeah, it would be a scratch. So we modeled it off of the kit, like the Estes kits that you would get, which are the normal model rocket kits. We looked at that and we’re like, how can we make that? And so we started playing around with materials. The thing about rockets is a lot of the designs scale up the same, and eventually by the end of the project, kids were running their own teams because throughout the iterations, they identified the things that they were good at and the things that contributed to a team collaborative structure. And they had their own flight teams, the five kids, and they built huge metal rockets that went 8,000 feet Mach 1. We launched it at a site and they knew all the math and everything in there. But that emerged through the questions and the iterations and the unpacking and the kids being able to identify what worked for them throughout that project.

Alec Patton:
Were there times that you were just like, man, I could just tell them all how to do this and we would save three weeks? Do you ever have that feeling as a teacher?

Andrew Lerario:
I think sometimes if you’ve done it and you know it, but I think that’s not something to keep from kids. I feel like in this iterative cycle, this communal learning structure, I feel like the teacher is more of a facilitator and more the adult learner in that space. Because in a community, everyone brings things to the table. And so you as a teacher, you bring your mastery of subject content, which is one part of doing the project. It’s not all of it. And you also bring this kind of adult learning habits towards the project work itself. And I think those are the things that really transfer onto the kids through this iterative cycle.
So I would never tell them how to do it, but I would share, this is my approach to trying to figure this out, and these are the things I have figured out when I’ve done this approach, and I’m going to kind of engage all of you in a similar approach and see what you guys figure out. And then we’re going to come back together and share what we have. And so even though I might be confident that I have an answer, I would never be confident that it’s the answer. And I would always try to invite more kids into that space, even if the things that they were contributed might not move the way we were going to proceed or shift it that much, their voices are still being heard. We’re still considering that and we’re still, and oftentimes it does change a lot about the way we’re going to proceed.

Alec Patton:
So if I’m a teacher listening to this and I’m like, okay, I got it. They’re going to build paper rockets and then they’re going to build rockets using stuff that we can get our hands on that mimic how a kit rocket works, and then eventually they’re going to be building metal rockets that go beyond the speed of sound. Great. Got it done. I’m going to go do that. What are the easy ways for that to go wrong? What should a teacher be wary of taking that approach?

Andrew Lerario:
I think planning with too many end expectations in mind. I think trusting the process is more important. I never knew we were going to end by building those big rockets, but the energy of the classroom, which I think is important for a teacher to be more of a conduit of energy instead of shutting it down. Oftentimes when you have too much of these are the expectations I have of where this project is going, and even though you might have a great idea, it doesn’t align with where I have expected that this is going to go. And so they shut down that energy, and I think it’s more important to follow where it’s going.
So if you trust in the process, it leaves the opportunity open to really follow those creative energies within the classroom. Again, you got to be intentional about you can’t follow everything that spiders off, but I think if you build, what is the next step from here? What are the interesting questions we want to pursue from this one? And it doesn’t necessarily lead to a fancier, shinier product we’re going to put on the wall, but it definitely leads to a better experience and the students are going to have a more important, a personalized story to share at the end of this during an exhibition or showcase of sorts.

Alec Patton:
But I mean, I assume when you start with those paper rockets, you’re, in your mind, even if you’re not stuck on it, you do have an idea of where you think you’re headed.

Andrew Lerario:
But it’s more a loose, I showed a video of a metal rocket going off in class on the day when I was like, I want to get there. I don’t know how far we’ll get, but that’d be really cool to do. And it’s just kind of like a buy-in vision kind of thing.

Alec Patton:
Do you have an example of a project where you were like, here’s our day one, our first iteration. I think that first iteration is heading here, but actually where the class ended up taking it was a totally unexpected place. Has that ever happened?

Andrew Lerario:
Yeah, that’s happened a ton of times. Actually. I can talk a little bit about that. With a jewelry making project that I’ve done, again, I went into this space not knowing too much. I had a student that had played around with it as a side project in class for a while, which is where a lot of it has come from. If there’s a space where a kid can kind of experiment a little bit, in addition to the work where it was lapidary work, they’re going out on hikes, he’s getting stones, he’s cutting them open, he’s polishing them, and he’s learning about them. That process was really cool, and I saw that being engaging for other students, and I was thinking, next year I’m going to develop a jewelry making project around this work, laboratory work.

Alec Patton:
What’s that word you’re saying?

Andrew Lerario:
Lapidary that’s just like, it’s a machine that polishes and shape stones, rocks, and things like into-

Alec Patton:
Is it like the rock tumbler or anything else?

Andrew Lerario:
A rock tumbler does similar things, but it just kind of tumbles rocks. A lapidary, so there’s different machines for this. The one that I use, the flat lapidary machine, it’s just a spinning disc, a grinding wheel, and you grind down stones to a certain shape and polish that you want. Then you can put it into pendants or jewelry or necklaces, things like that. So I got a lot of these machines in the classroom, and the idea was like, I’m just going to get a bunch of these stones and bring them in and just order them, and we’re going to chop them up with a rock saw and we’re going to polish them. But then some of the kids were like, oh, my dad is into this and he goes out on hikes here, or my cousin or my mom does this stuff. And so we’re like, well, let’s go on a hike.
And so we went out on a hike and then we started collecting some rocks that we would bring back. But then kids started noticing other things in the hike, and they started connecting to people that have relationships in those spaces, park rangers, people from the indigenous communities that have relationships with the land, and they can speak more to that. So this opportunity to engage with community partners in these spaces and to see what perspectives they bring to the work. That shifted this entire concept that I had in the beginning of this work where we’re just going to make some cool rock jewelry stuff now, it became this idea of how does this connect to the way that people look at the land, the way that we engage with the land. Conversations about natural parks came up, doing more outdoor experiential learning. Kids started making bentwood jewelry. They were gathering wood from these spaces and wetting it and bending it around like a socket and then laying it down. This was made from that actually.

Alec Patton:
Oh, wow. For the listeners, he’s holding up a ring that it would not have occurred to me was student work. That’s awesome.

Andrew Lerario:
So, it just emerged. Some kids got into macrame and beading, and then they started connecting with communities that were doing that. So I think the mechanism that shifted the work was really engaging with the community partners around the work that was happening and seeing what value those communities of practice or those just communities that exist bringing into the work and then being able to explore those as well.

Alec Patton:
Okay, real quick, that’s your wedding ring finger.

Andrew Lerario:
Yes.

Alec Patton:
Did you ask a kid to make your wedding ring? How did that-

Andrew Lerario:
We had a socket in a toolkit that was the same size as my wedding ring, and so we wrapped the wood around that. It was just a piece of thin veneer kind of that we found, and they wrapped it around that. And then when it dried, we just used a lot of super glue and put it on a little mini lathe and sanded it down. And that was basically, it was pretty easy, actually.

Alec Patton:
Cool. So that’s a replacement wedding ring then?

Andrew Lerario:
Yeah. Yeah. This isn’t the wedding ring. This wasn’t on the day.

Alec Patton:
Got it.

Andrew Lerario:
I didn’t bust out a student.

Alec Patton:
All right. What ultimately did you exhibit from that project?

Andrew Lerario:
So kids were making all their own jewelry. They were giving it to people, which was a whole nother story. Who are you going to give this to? So there’s an audience. So parents came in and they were able to share the stuff that they got, and the kids actually made a bunch of things that were all on display. Some of them sold some pieces, but they did make one final piece for the school, which was we had this geo that we chopped this big slab from, drilled a hole out from the center and put a clock mechanism in. And there was a teacher there, the name of Blair Hatch that actually had this idea, and we kind of ran with it, and each kid polished a stone for the hours and around the clock, and it just became kind of this polished stone piece that went up in the school. So it represented kind of the entirety of the work.

Alec Patton:
Oh, cool.

Andrew Lerario:
And kids got to speak a little bit about what was meaningful for them in a project. I think that’s really important. And it happens in the iterative design that kids are allowed to identify the things that are significant in their learning, and that becomes part of the things within that community of practice that you’re developing within the classroom that become the new educational currency, I guess. Those are the things that are valued. It’s not the narrow scope of some rubric that was applied before we even started the work. And so kids are able to participate and contribute. They develop a signature within that space. And I think signature work for a kid or for anyone, is work that whose it is without their name on it, because they’re able to contribute to that space in a way with their creativity and the choices they’ve made that creates something that is unique and speaks to who they are.

Alec Patton:
So one thing that I’ve found as a teacher was that the dynamics within and between students are way more powerful than the dynamics between you as a teacher and those students. And something that I would see play out a lot is that we’d be doing a project, one group of kids would get stoked about something. Another group of kids would be like, well, if they’re stoked about it, we think it sucks. And it was because they had this kind of sense of who they were and them kind of defining their little crews and opposition to each other. Maybe that just never happens to you, but what do you do?

Andrew Lerario:
No, that’s real. I think in those spaces, you slow it down. Sometimes the goal for continuing the project and moving forward and covering content and covering things can weigh so much on a teacher. Sometimes it can be a lot helpful just to slow it down and have conversations with kids in the classroom. What kind of space do we want this to look like? And I think a lot of that comes down to where kids might not feel ownership in that space too. How are we giving them ownership? I think that’s the biggest thing in education. Education has been, learning has been re appropriated and governed by a separate entity from the individual within an educational space. How are we creating the structures to give kids choices, to let them kind of see the ramifications of their choices and to own it and to own the things that come out of their creative stuff.
So I think three things that I look at in that slowing down process is how are we decentralizing the class so those kids have a space in it? How are we personalizing it so they can speak to some of the things that matter to them or see themselves in the work? And how are we sharing cognitive loads so that teachers aren’t just dictating what to do and how to do all the time that the kids are participating in that? And I think when you start slowing down the classroom and engaging in those conversations, kids start to have a little bit more buy-in. Even if they don’t like something, they know that their voice will be heard if they can communicate about what they don’t like, and then maybe follow up with an expectation about what can we change? And so cool, you can be in charge of this change. You are the person who is responsible for this. Let’s follow through with it so that your voice is honored in this space.

Alec Patton:
Yeah, that reminds me that I found that probably 90% of the disciplinary problems or issues that we were having, cultural issues we were having in the classroom, stopped being problems if you just had a conversation without an audience, with an individual kid or a small group of kids where you just took the time to have that conversation, it’s like it’s magic.

Andrew Lerario:
Yeah, kids want to be noticed. They want to be noticed. And think about it, even as a teacher, if you’re in a really traditional space where everything’s been dictated to you that you have to cover, they tend to get worn out. They’re like, all right, I’ll do my job. They call it. I’ll do what’s being told from me. I think kids kind of feel the same way. I’ll do what I’m told to do. And at a certain point, you might just feel like your identity is being realized within that space.

Alec Patton:
So your former colleague, Jeff Robin, has a phrase often quoted, “Do the project yourself first.” This seems like a different approach.

Andrew Lerario:
No, I think you still do it enough to get started, but yes, I would also say that it does go against it a little bit because the model I’m proposing is more emergent within the space. And Jeff I think thinks more about how are we planning out the entire project. It’s really good advice. I think if you were to marry the two, I think it’s know enough to get started so that you can at least do that first or second iteration with some base set of knowledge where you have an understanding of some of the outcomes and how you’re going to facilitate the work in the classroom around that.

Alec Patton:
Yeah. At the very least, you’re saying, “Hey, here’s a stomp rocket that I built. Here’s what I found doing it.”

Andrew Lerario:
And I think that’s the way you said that is really important. This is one that I did. It doesn’t necessarily have to be the one that you make. This is where essential question comes in, because an essential question gets to the heart of why we’re doing this work. And if you create a model of something, you’re not saying, make this model the way I did. But really what you’re saying, this is my interpretation in the creative space that I’ve had within this question to create this thing. I want you to exercise your own creative capacity within this question and see what you come up with. And if you’re stumped, you can look at this model to understand some of the creative choices I’ve made and what the outcome was.

Alec Patton:
So when you were building Stomp Rockets, what was your essential question? Do you remember?

Andrew Lerario:
I guess the essential question was can we do rocket science? And really the rocket project was about hope because the idea was how can we do something perceptively incredibly difficult within a school, something that kids typically don’t study at this age because it’s perceived as being too challenging. You’re like, let’s do rocket science. And that’s what we did. And so by the end of it, the outcomes that I was looking for, the measures was kids being able to have a greater sense of confidence and hope for the things that they could accomplish because they had a sense that they already did rocket science, they can do anything. That was the idea.

Alec Patton:
Yeah. And then what was the essential question for the jewelry project?

Andrew Lerario:
There wasn’t really an essential question. It was more just like, how can we engage in this learning? I think if I were to look back on that and reengage with that, I think a good question would be, what does it mean to be indigenous to space? Because going back and re-exploring that, a lot of times, especially in Western culture, we have the separation of the outdoors from who we are, our spaces. And when you look at it from, I think, more of that indigenous angle, I don’t mean to speak to something that I don’t know a lot about, but it’s more about how are we living with nature? How are we a part of the system? How are we understanding the give and take from our actions within a space, right? And the values that come out of that.

Alec Patton:
Awesome, man. Thank you so much.

Andrew Lerario:
Cool.

Alec Patton:
High Tech High Unboxed is hosted and edited by me, Alec Patton. Our theme music is by Brother Herschel. You can find out more about Andrew and Adam Borek’s work in our show notes. Thanks for listening.