HCC's West Houston Institute gets inspiration from MIT

Apr 30, 2019

The West Houston Institute’s Jordan Carswell, program director of Makerspace and IDEAS, and Alexandra Almestica, public service librarian, travelled to Boston April 16-19 to work with Dr. Susan Klimczak, Education Organizer at the South End Technology Center (SETC), on a proposed collaboration to adapt the Center’s Learn2Teach Teach2Learn (L2TT2L) into the IDEAS Academy Early College program.

L2TT2L is a youth program that trains Boston teens to teach creative technology workshops to more than 600 youths in the Boston area. The Center’s founder, Mel King, developed the program 17 years ago with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) as part of its creation of the first FabLab outside the university at SETC.

Dr. Klimczak provided hands-on demonstrations of the current approach to teaching youth, and Carswell and Almestica were able to interview youth teachers to learn about their first-hand impressions of the program. Carswell is working on adapting the core elements of the program--peer teaching and community impact--as a capstone experience for early college students participating in IDEAS Academy.
 
The WHI duo had the opportunity to meet with King, as well as David Cavallo, who led the Future of Learning Group at MIT under Seymour Papert, world-renown mathematician and innovation pioneer who helped create the original version of L2TT2L. As part of their visit, the team also met with Dr. Natalie Rusk, Research Scientist with MIT’s Lifelong Kindergarten group, who developed Scratch, an interactive programming platform and community that has taught coding to millions of children globally. The HCC duo shared the work being done at WHI to reimagine higher education, and received positive feedback on those efforts.
 
The trip concluded with MIT’s annual Tech Conference, hosted by the Sloan Management School, and featured guest speakers from the MIT research community, venture capitalists, and keynoted this year by Arianna Huffington and Evan Spiegel, co-founder of Snap.

The opportunity to see how MIT engages its undergraduates in entrepreneurial thinking offered important insights into how similar practices might be provided at West Houston Institute in the future.