The Do-It-Yourself Prosthetics studio was recently featured on news station NECN. The piece offers a good sense of what NuVu is all about.

Skills & Experiences

NuVu students experience an intense interdisciplinary environment characterized by ambiguous, complex, and unstructured problems to be addressed by rigorous brainstorming, collaborating, iterating, design, and experimental methodologies.

Students will also develop and enhance critically important 21st-century academic and life skills, including:

• Collaboration and collaborative problem-solving
• Working in an entirely project-based environment
• Learning cutting-edge technical skills using technologies and tools currently under development at the MIT Media Lab, start up tech companies, and elsewhere
• Working in a multi-age environment with peers and adults
• Working with open-structured problems in a multidisciplinary, results-focused environment

Students also increase their familiarity with and ability to apply traditional intellectual and academic skills, including: 

• Research
• Oral communication and presentation
• Quantitative reasoning and analysis
• Visual and digital art-making
• Scientific reasoning and analysis

The iterative process in the design studio is intended to provide students with continual feedback on performance as well as product, with the experience of working in an intense, feedback-rich environment providing students with information and support for continuous self-evaluation, reflection, and improvement. 

The primary means of evaluation is an end-of-trimester exhibition and review. At the conclusion of the program students will receive a narrative review of their work during the NuVu trimester as well as a final evaluation of either “Pass” or “No Credit.” 

For more information about NuVu and how students learn here, please visit our General Information page.

About Us

Established in the fall of 2010 in Cambridge, MA, NuVu is an award winning full-time innovation studio for high school students. NuVu’s pedagogy is based on the architectural studio model and geared around multi-disciplinary, collaborative projects.  NuVu provides students the opportunity to work collaboratively with academic and professional experts (PhDs/alumni from MIT and Harvard as well as leading professionals) to solve real-world problems. NuVu nurtures creative problem solving, team collaboration across networks, oral and presentation skills, technological proficiency, systems thinking, adaptability, risk-taking and imagination; All critical for student success in the 21st century.

Teaching Pedagogy

NuVu is a full-time magnet innovation center for middle and high school students. NuVu’s pedagogy is based on the architectural Studio model and geared around multi-disciplinary, collaborative projects. We basically teach students how to navigate the messiness of the creative process, from inception to completion.

So, what makes us different? 

No Courses: Instead, we have studios. Around 12 kids work closely with their 2 coaches on solving big (and small) open-ended problems. 

No Subjects: Instead, everything is fused together. Students find themselves moving between a studio that requires them to design a telepresence robot to another that requires them to re-imagine Boston with a cable car system. 

No Classrooms: Instead, we have an open space that changes all the time to adapt to the needs of every studio.  

No 90-Minute Class Schedule: Instead, students spend two weeks from 9-3 solving one problem.  

No Grades: Instead, we have portfolios that document students' design decisions and show their final products and provide extensive written feedback on all aspects of the student experience.