Tapping the creativity of teens to solve real problems
“What is it you wish your backpack or bike lock could do differently?” The question hung in the air for a few minutes before the kids assembled at Mitchell Park for a new program called D Farm that aims to “cultivate the next generation of entrepreneurs.”
“I hate U locks,” said one girl passionately. “I need a backpack that doesn’t shake when I run with it,” one boy added. Before long, the room was buzzing with the sound of young people who are intrinsically interested in what they are discussing.
D Farm kids learning together at Mitchell Park Community Center
D Farm: teaching kids ‘design thinking’ strategies
This kind of creative thinking is exactly what Donald Olgado, one of the founders of D Farm, was hoping to generate when he started the program last year. After years spent as an engineer in Silicon Valley, Olgado observed that many of his co-workers were good at solving other people’s problems, but unaware of how to apply this know-how on their own.
Donald Olgado, one of the co-founders of D Farm
With two kids of his own at Paly, Olgado envisioned a program that would teach teens how to use the “design thinking” process to identify challenges in their own world and learn how to solve them. “The Valley is full of solutions looking for a problem,” he explained, “But the world needs people to discover problems and find new ways of addressing them.”
Expertise in patents, bioengineering and more
To design the curriculum for D Farm, Donald joined up with Christine Chan, a patent expert who worked at Oracle, Ross Venook, a lecturer in Bioengineering at Stanford, and Bryant Lin, a Stanford Biodesign Fellow.
The program follows the ‘design thinking‘ approach used in bioengineering, which is based around three key steps: 1) observe with curiosity, 2) empathize with the perspective of the user, and 3) create solutions and test them, making changes based on user experience and feedback.
Workshops and mentoring with local experts to bring ideas into the world
D Farm, which is in the process of becoming a certified nonprofit, has two program elements- workshops where kids learn the design thinking process and use it to identify needs and create solutions, and the ‘teen cubator’ program, where kids work with mentors to figure out how to bring their ideas into the real world. The workshops are fee-based, and the D Farm team hopes to eventually leverage some of the entrepreneurial ideas from the ‘teen-cubator’ to obtain grants or corporate underwriting.
‘Teen cubator’ kids envision cool ways to make things better
What kinds of ideas have the D Farm kids envisioned so far? Everything from an app to measure homework time to a scale that focuses on the center of gravity to figure out which parts of the body are losing or gaining pounds.
teamwork and fun are part of the design thinking process
Donald has had no problem attracting expert local mentors to work with the D Farm entrepreneurs, but the challenge is fitting ‘teen-cubator‘ pursuits into the busy schedule of local teens.
“About 50% of the kids who have taken a D Farm workshop are pursuing their ideas with a mentor,” Donald said. “But our biggest limitation is finding time when the kids can get together and put things into action.”
Looking beyond Palo Alto to reach more young people
Given the already enriched lives of Palo Alto teens, Donald and the D Farm team are looking at possible partnerships in East Palo Alto, where kids don’t have easy access to entrepreneurial training or mentors, and the impact of the design thinking exercises could spark new ways of thinking about the future.
Showing kids that design means way more than drawing
Regardless of how incubated the ideas from D Farm ever get, the workshops are showing Palo Alto kids that not every problem in the world just needs a new app. “I always hated design because I thought it was about being an architect,” said Harrison, a ninth grader who participated in D Farm last summer. “Now I realize that it’s fun to design ideas that could turn into something real to help the community.”
