The following article was submitted by Kathryn Lee, Director of Service Learning at Prospect Sierra Middle School, after an Earth Day activity conducted by Darfur Stoves Project volunteer Dr. Susan Addy.
In celebration of the 40th anniversary of Earth Day, Prospect Sierra’s goal was to ignite our school’s imagination and spur positive action.
Inspired by a hands-on course at UC Berkeley entitled, “Design for Sustainable Communities,” we focused on the connections between people, poverty and the planet, and how “design thinking” can lead to innovations that improve people’s lives while conserving resources.
Dr. Susan Addy, a postdoctoral fellow in Civil and Environmental Engineering at UC Berkeley as well as the instructor of the 2010 spring course, spoke to our middle school students about Darfur, and shared the remarkable story of how the Berkeley-Darfur Stove was developed.
She explained “I’m going to tell about ways that you can think about design that you may never have thought of before, and ways to think about technology that you may have never thought of before, and show you how people just like you have gone on to really make a difference in some of these huge problems, while doing what they love.”
Dr. Addy explained the importance of asking and listening as first steps in “human-centered design.”
“It is the ways in which you are unique that you have the most to offer to the world,” she said, adding, “It’s the way that you think differently that you can contribute the most–and you may hate that you think a little differently, because it makes it hard to learn math, or social studies, or music as fast as everyone else seems to be able to, but that is also the way that you will be able to think of a new design or a new solution that no one else can.”
For the afternoon, Prospect Sierra middle school students were immersed in design challenges offered by amazing professionals throughout the Bay Area. Of the many exciting and compelling workshops, one of the most popular was called: Design and Create an Advertising Video, led by Johanna Mathieu, a PhD student in Mechanical Engineering at UC Berkeley and instructor in the “Design for Sustainable Communities” course. Students created advertising videos for the Berkeley-Darfur Stove, which were later presented to the student body in a final Earth Day assembly.
Dr. Addy’s story of the Berkeley-Darfur Stove became a defining example of how engineers are creatively and sensitively responding to some of the earth’s most pressing issues. Prospect Sierra School thanks the amazing people involved with the Darfur Stoves Project for collaborating with us to create a day of transformative learning. Earth Day was just the beginning of a deeper dive into how we can become problem-solvers for a more sustainable world, right here in our own community.
