The Fairytale Lab Last semester, Lower School students at The Peck School dedicated a day and a half to a playful design-thinking challenge involving classic stories, empathy for fairytale characters, looming issues, and the prototyping of grand solutions. On November 10-11, children in grades one to four took a ‘deep dive’ into a few classic fairy tales as they reframed a tale’s central scenario and found ways to improve the lives of the characters. Working in small teams, they designed solutions to engineer positive change in the lives of heroes and heroines in the fairytale world.
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they designed podcasts and media to bring her up to speed intellectually. T H I R D - G R A D E S T U D E N T S were
given the tale of Little Red Riding Hood, and their design task was to create prototypes
with someone’s struggle, defining what is a problem, and brainstorming answers, before engineering their solution and testing their prototypes. They drew upon elements of science, technology, engineering, art, and math (STEAM) as
of bait and traps that could incarcerate the nasty wolf. With a strict budget, students used their math skills to manage the purchase of supplies and inventory. FIRST AND SECOND GRADERS
were also given Fairytale Lab design tasks F O U R T H - G R A D E S T U D E N T S tackled
Rapunzel. After thoroughly familiarizing themselves with the tale, they first set up a mock interview with the trapped heroine. After the interview, teams approached her predicament from various angles. One team decided to design an escape route for Rapunzel. Another team decided that, since escape was inevitable, they would design a safe house for Rapunzel to eventually own once liberated. One team’s empathy led them to conclude that Rapunzel would need to be reacclimated to society after such a long seclusion, so
to improve the experience of a fairytale protagonist. Second-grade teams created prototypes of a bridge that could safely handle both Robin Hood and Little John crossing side by side, while first graders constructed towers, catapults, and any
they tackled their hands-on projects. But
means they could think of to allow the
most importantly, the children thoroughly
fictional fox in The Fox and The Grapes to
enjoyed themselves—showing that a love
catch his grapes.
of learning is most powerfully nurtured by
Throughout the course of the day-and a-half-long exercise, Lower School
pairing children’s innate curiosity, and the magic of play.
students found themselves in all phases of the design thinking process: empathizing
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