IBM Poughkeepsie Designers Host Poughkeepsie Day School Programming Class

Written by Cheryl D. Loughlin, IBM Software Engineer

What do junior and senior programming students at Poughkeepsie Day School have in common with IBM Poughkeepsie designers? Quite a bit, actually. We all like to innovate and solve problems! Theresa Hans, Kirsten Brunner-McDonald, and I welcomed these students and their technology teacher, Carol Bahruth, to our Poughkeepsie Agile Workspace on Thursday, December 15, 2016.

I worked with my team to coordinate the event, and kicked it off by giving the group a tour of our new Agile Workspace, showing the collaborative work areas and new technology available. After the tour, we settled in the Workspace Café area, and the students demonstrated how they are learning to code and solve problems by programming Ozobots, mini robots that travel on color-coded paths. Next, Theresa presented an overview of IBM Design Thinking and explained what we, as designers, do at IBM. Then Kirsten lead a design thinking activity in which the students had to design a better way for various “user types” to wake up in the morning. During this activity, the students worked in small groups, diverging and converging on big ideas, and playing them back to the larger group, which included two of our other designers, Ann Novelli and Adaoha Uzoho-Onyekwelu, who stopped in to help facilitate.

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PDS students work on a Design-Thinking activity at the IBM Agile Design Center — Photo by Theresa Hans, IBM

The students will take their new design thinking knowledge back to school and use it to help them design a product or service for a “Shark Tank” presentation at the end of January. This type of knowledge sharing in our community is valuable for everyone, as the students learned about design thinking and how we work as designers at IBM, and we got a glimpse into a high schooler’s experience learning how coding skills can affect the “real” world. We plan to meet
with this group of very bright students again to see the innovative ideas they come up with, so check back with us in the next few months!