OVERVIEW OF THE EVENT:
This year, my Digital Design (DDL) Lab class put on our second Create-a-thon which is essentially a school-wide design challenge. For this event, students were asked to get into pre-made teams to create an art piece. This piece was shown at the end of our class’ video in the Napa Lighted Arts Festival. Throughout the day, we held workshops on Adobe products put on by actual Adobe employees. Thankfully, the day went even better than the year before and we are already talking about how we can make it even better for next year.
MY ROLE:
Last year I was one of the Project managers in charge of 5 other people and was right below the Product Manager. This year, I was honored to be one of the two Product Managers. This title came with a lot of responsibility and pressure. In a nutshell, we “designed” the day. We created the curriculum, branding/the logo, schedule, student teams, and kept a communicated pathway with Adobe. Each class the Product Managers for the Create-a-thon (my friend and I) and the Lighted Arts Festival (my other two friends) meet and share updates, bounce ideas off each other, and get our work done. This role was so much more than I originally thought, but at the end of the day, it was all worth it and I learned so much.
WORKING WITH ADOBE:
This year we continued our partnership with Adobe. Roughly every month we could connect with the team we were working with sharing updates, changes, and addressed questions and more. I and my co-product manager would tune into video conference meetings with almost the entire team. I and four other students from our class traveled to San Fransisco to the Adobe Offices to have a lunchtime booth recruiting employees to come up to Napa on the day of the Create-a-thon. On that day, we had about 10-15 people from Adobe come up and help that day. Some simply wanted to see the festivities, some helped out with technical questions and some lead workshops. We had 3 workshops with ranging attendance levels but none the less extremely special, helpful, informative, and fun. In the end, this event would not have been possible without the amazing help from the Adobe, the education team and specifically, our main contact, Clara Galan.
TAKING THE DAY GLOBAL:
This year, we decided to take this event global and to other schools. This summer, my teacher, Lisa Gottfried, and I presented to the Adobe Education Leaders Summit about what we did last year and our intentions for this year. This proved very effective with schools from all over the world showing interest in participating. We had two ways they could get involved: 1. Host their own Create-a-thon and submit to our global showcase submissions. 2. Video conference in and participate with us on the day of the event. We had people are all over the world participate with us. People from Finland, Switzerland, Maine and more submitted to the global showcase submission. We also had four schools call in on the day of. We had Nitro High School from West Virginia, San Marino High School from Los Angeles, Fredrick Community College in Maryland, and George Brown University Design School from Toronto.
PLAY-BY-PLAY OF THE DAY:
The day started bright and early with me having to be at school at 5:45 with a coffee in hand. I started by giving a 30 minutes introduction to a class in West Virginia about how the day will work and answered any questions they had. Once they were on their way, I proceeded to go around and make sure our school was properly set up and all ready for the students to arrive at 8 am. As everyone was arriving, one of my classmates and I made sure to stand by the front office welcoming the Adobe employees making sure they get settled and knew where to go. At around 8:15, my co-product manager and I started the Roll-out of the day to all 400 student who were participating in person. We went through how the day would go and what we were asking of them in depth. We also went through all the four other schools that participated in the event with us through a video call. Once we wrapped up the introduction, the students went to their assigned rooms and the day officially started. During the work sessions, the DDL students (including me) went through classes. We helped groups brainstorm, overcome challenges and tried to answer any questions they had. While doing this, I was also going about checking in the with folks from Adobe, my class members and our school’s teachers/admin. I also made sure to go around and remind people of the Adobe workshops while also taking a few minutes to pop into some of them. At the end of the day, we had a closing meeting (much like the roll-out’s set up). For that, we gave shoutouts to community partners, gave out prizes to students who went above and beyond with the day’s activities, and showed some of our submissions.
INTERESTED IN LEARNING MORE?
If you would like to read more about all this day was, we were lucky enough to have a couple of articles written about the event. One source is from HundrED.org. We were actually chosen as one of the Top 100 Global Innovations in Education by HundrEd. Another great source is by our local paper, the Napa Register. One of their reporters was actually able to come to the event!
One of the DDL Students, Gavin Armendariz focused on documenting the entire event. He went from the very beginning all the way to filming the day. If you want to see a brief but informative 2-minute video, here is it:
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