Going Gaga for Design Thinking

By Madalynn Tharp

While looking for ways to improve our campus, Sara Price’s Design Thinking elective came
up with the idea of creating a Gaga Ball court after hearing multiple opinions about students
wanting more lunch time activities and connectivity.
“Design Thinking to me is a mindset, and it’s a way of thinking,” Sara explained. ”What does
it mean to go slow to go fast? What does it mean to really empathize with whoever is going to
be using the product?” With this mindset the designers and inventors in Sara's class can create
products that actually benefit the AHS community instead of just coming up with a shallow idea
that has no rationale behind it.
Designing products that will have a positive impact on AHS takes a few different steps:
empathize, ideate, and prototype are just a few. “Right now we are in the prototype stage of the
project, and what that means is that [the class] has to make and play with their ideas so that
they can get feedback from the users,” Sara explained. In this case, the users are the teachers
and students who already submitted their feedback to the class through Google form.
However, before any prototyping could happen, the students first had to find something that
AHS needed. To find this missing thing each student conducted a few interviews. “Their goal
was to just figure out what students need and want from Animas that they are not getting right
now,” Sara shared.
A common theme was that AHS students want to see improvements at lunch time, such as
better seating options, more options for activities, and opportunities to expand connections
during lunch even beyond their friend groups. Design Thinker Bryan Gnehm explained, “We
figured a Gaga [ball] pit is something a lot of people would like and a lot of people could enjoy
during lunch.”
The class split into three groups with one of them focusing on designing the Gaga Ball court.
The group scouted out and discovered the perfect place for the court, on the north side of the
west building, where in past years a skateboard ramp resided, but now is known by some
students as “the no man's land.”
At first, the Design Thinking class only hoped to use the Makers Space lab to build the Gaga
Ball pit but after a serendipitous miscommunication, it turned out that Brayden Harms from the
Makers’ Space Club had already designed a Gaga Ball court. Sara recruited Brayden to come
to her class to collaborate with the Gaga group.
After receiving feedback from their peers,the group started on their second round of
prototypes, where the project is slowly manifesting into a reality. Bryan Gnehm described the
design idea for the Gaga Ball court, “We decided that we are going to go with Animas colors,
maybe with a mural hopefully done by the Art Department.” Part of the design that was quite
important to the class was making the Gaga Ball pit portable so that it can be moved to the new
campus next year.
The timeline for the remainder of the project is to find all the necessary funding and to finish
building the gaga ball court, which is already underway. As a semester-long class, the students
will only have four weeks after their final prototype to implement their designs.
 The Design Thinking class and their projects are a representation of the beautiful work
that AHS strives for in their students, advocating for change in our school community and
project design and implementation.

The image below was designed by Gaga group member Asher Rehman in the 3D image
program Blender.

While looking for ways to improve our campus, Sara Price’s Design Thinking elective came
up with the idea of creating a Gaga Ball court after hearing multiple opinions about students
wanting more lunch time activities and connectivity.
“Design Thinking to me is a mindset, and it’s a way of thinking,” Sara explained. ”What does
it mean to go slow to go fast? What does it mean to really empathize with whoever is going to
be using the product?” With this mindset the designers and inventors in Sara's class can create
products that actually benefit the AHS community instead of just coming up with a shallow idea
that has no rationale behind it.
A common theme was that AHS students want to see improvements at lunch time, such as
better seating options, more options for activities, and opportunities to expand connections
during lunch even beyond their friend groups. Design Thinker Bryan Gnehm explained, “We
figured a Gaga [ball] pit is something a lot of people would like and a lot of people could enjoy
during lunch.”
Bryan Gnehm described the design idea for the Gaga Ball court, “We decided that we are
going to go with Animas colors, maybe with a mural hopefully done by the Art Department.” Part
of the design that was quite important to the class was making the Gaga Ball pit portable so that
it can be moved to the new campus next year.
The timeline for the remainder of the project is to find all the necessary funding and to finish
building the gaga ball court, which is already underway. As a semester-long class, the students
will only have four weeks after their final prototype to implement their designs.