We're getting close to the end of the Winter 2018-19 Trimester at NuVu, and students are in the midst of Open Innovation Studio and preparing for the Final Exhibition and Demo Day. This Winter, we have the largest cohort of any year, with around 63 students enrolled in NuVu full-time from grades 7-12. Students are creating projects that include a Snowman Spin Seat for Boston, a Social Media Dress that represents social media’s effect on in-person socializing, an Intelligence Chess Set that teaches people the hierarchy in marine intelligence by showing the traits of marine animals, a Bio-Communication device made of bioplastics, and around 30 other projects.

Post by Ramzi Naja, Head of Innovation at NuVu-Karam in NuVu in Cambridge, MA

Our NuVuX school in Reyhanli, Turkey celebrated their latest exhibit that took place at Karam House on January 4. There were over 500 attendees. At the Karam House, around 140 students participate in the Karam Lab which uses NuVu's studio approach to engage students in meaningful projects. At this last exhibition, students presented work from the Fall Semester studios, including Morphing Playgrounds, Minibots, Aging in the City, Urban Refuge, Corners of Life, Gathering Lights, Flyingbots, and Documentary Narratives.

Photos by Suliman Faour

Our students at NuVuX-Karam House in Istanbul, Turkey celebrated their first exhibition. It was a spectacular event to launch the new school.

Photos by Beshr Abdulhadi

Post by James Addison, Design Education Fellow at Kelvinside Academy in Glasgow U.K.

Greetings from Scotland! New ideas are in the air at Kelvinside Academy in Glasgow, where construction of the new Innovation School is juxtaposed against the school’s historic stone facade from 1878. This term will bring to an exciting conclusion to the first year of NuVu’s inaugural European partnership with Kelvinside Academy.

This year’s theme of “Future Worlds” was explored throughout this past term. In Super-Enabling Devices, 7th-grade students collaborated with residents at Balmanno House, a residential care facility, to design devices that empower users to perform tasks above and beyond their former capability. In Fables Retold: Beyond the Book, students analyzed the structure of favorite fables and re-imagined them through augmented reality.

The theme of “Future Worlds” will continue this term through studios centered on “Future Cities” and “Future Nature.” The term begins with 8th-grade students in Unveiling the Unseen, a studio that will challenge students to design a personal device that transforms their experience of exploring urban space. Later in the term, in Bio-Wearables, 6th-grade students will create body-extensions based on natural phenomenon they discover and research in the nearby Glasgow Botanic Gardens. 

Valley News covered our NuVuX program in Woodstock, VT at the Woodstock Union High School and Middle School where students are working with our Fellow, Max Vanatta, as part of the Innovation, Design, Engineering and Action (IDEA) class and three other classes to learn about the design process, feedback, and constructive failure.

Read the piece:

In Woodstock, High School Innovation Lab Teaches Constructive Failure

Published in The Valley News
Piece by Sarah Earle, Valley News Staff Writer
Photo Credit to James M. Patterson, Valley News

Post by Rima Das, Design Education Fellow at Wonder in Wichita, Kansas

At NuVuX-Wonder in Wichita, Kansas, students participated in an investor pitch today. The students are creating products that they will sell on Etsy by the end of the session. Today, they pitched their products to investors and used their prototypes to get additional funding to create more refined versions.

The first team is making scented candles with prizes inside, the second team is creating an animal storage container, the third team is making slime, and the fourth team is designing a board game!

Post by Dyani Robarge, Design Education Fellow at Episcopal School in Baton Rouge, LA

NuVuX is going strong in Louisiana. The program has just kicked off another semester at the Episcopal School of Baton Rouge and students have adjusted well to the school’s beautiful new build space.

The engineering-focused studios are taking a dive under Louisiana’s watery depths this spring. Students in the “Swampbots” studio will design robots that float along the swamp’s surface, scuttle along the shoreline or traverse the banks of the Baton Rouge lakes system in order to aid with the area’s ecological restoration efforts.

Our entrepreneurship studio, “Culinary Crossroads,” is partnering with students at the Karam House Foundation in Istanbul, Turkey to design and market food products that appeal to an international audience. After developing a regional dish and tailoring it to another culture’s tastes, students will develop a business plan and marketing campaign for their food product.

In what ways can our words occupy our surroundings? Through a series of design and writing exercises, students in the humanities-based studio “Space and Place” are analyzing the city’s makeup, histories, and the lives of the people behind neighborhood stories. 

Post by Kristina Osborn, NuVuX Program Designer at NuVu in Cambridge, MA

At our NuVuX partner school All Saints Academy, students showcased their work in three Upper School studios as part of the December Expo. The exhibition included a special collaborative studio called “Gathering Lights.” In this studio, students used light to augment, amplify and expand the meaning and understanding of something significant in their own daily lives. In collaboration with our NuVuX school in Rehyanli, Turkey called Karam House, students used light as a medium for storytelling and connection across long distances.

Projects included Purpose of Perspective, where students created custom formed letter objects that created different words when light shifted from one side to the other; the Infinity Mirror, which linked math, the universal language, to an interactive mirror illusion; and The Human Scale, a dancer-inspired sculpture which balanced glowing orbs on its spine. Students regularly met with their peers in Turkey to develop projects that were rooted in their own experience, but were able to be understood from thousands of miles away.

As part of International Day of Disabled Persons (IDPD) 2018 on Monday, December 3, NuVu collaborated with Heidi Latsky Dance to produce the ON DISPLAY Global event at the Boston Architectural College. The performative wearables designed by our NuVu students for the event silhouetted the dancers for this unique show.

As the UN states, "The theme for this year’s IDPD is “Empowering persons with disabilities and ensuring inclusiveness and equality”. This theme focuses on the empowering persons with disabilities for the inclusive, equitable and sustainable development envisaged in the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.

The 2030 Agenda, pledging to 'leave no one behind,' is an ambitious plan of action of the international community towards a peaceful and prosperous world, where dignity of an individual person and equality among all is applied as the fundamental principle, cutting across the three pillars of the work of the United Nations: Development, Human Rights and Peace and Security. It is critical to ensure, in this regard, the full and equal participation of persons with disabilities in all spheres of society and create enabling environments by, for and with persons with disabilities."

More info on the event can be found at https://the-bac.edu/experience-the-bac/news-and-events/events/on-display-global.

NuVu Summer 2019 has launched!
 

ONLINE REGISTRATION NOW OPEN!

We have three summer programs launching today - open to students, ages 11-18.

Summer 2019 Programs:

Summer 2019 "Bioinfinity" (Ages 11-13, Grades 6-8)
NuVu at MIT Design Studios "On The Brink" (Ages 14-18, Grades 9-12, Post-High School)
NuVu at MIT Design Studios Residential (Ages 14-18, Grades 9-12, Post-High School)

Summer 2019 Program Dates:
Session I:    July 8-19, 2019
Session II:   July 22-August 2, 2019
Session III:  August 5-16, 2019
 

This Summer 2019, we stand at the edge to explore our planet Earth on the brink of change. We’ll examine a range of topics, including pre-disaster preparedness and post-disaster relief, technologies such as gene modification and prosthetics that extend our biological capacities, the use of adaptive technologies and AI to deliver on-demand healthcare and precision medicine, and climate-controlled food production using food computers to deliver tasty fruits and veggies.

Choose from 24 unique two-week studios, including Soft Robotics, Fantastical Droids, Musical Prosthetics, AI Neural Networks, Bio Design: Synthetic Biology, Beyond Earth, Future Augmented Reality Games, Food Fabrication Lab, Digital Street Couture, and more!

Register before December 31st and catch our Early-Bird Discount!