Cultivating Curiosity. Doreen Gehry Nelson

had been teaching kids about cities in an after-school class called “Fantastic Cities” at Barnsdall Park in Los Angeles.

      When we teamed up, Frank and I decided that since we had both built cities with kids, we would do that at the Smithsonian, although our motivations differed. Frank thought of the city as a palette for creative thinking about the built environment; I was fixated on the City as a tool for the transference of learning.

      We wanted to have fun together, so on the plane to Washington, we made up a story about a miracle element that would save the world from pollution. We called this element “Purium,” and in a dark basement room of the Castle Building at the Smithsonian, we told the middle school students there that they were agents of the government assigned to build and govern a City of the Future for a population that would mine, process, and ship the “Purium.”

The director of the Smithsonian provided an array of arts and crafts materials. The teacher in me insisted that the kids refer to a Criteria List of “Don't Wants” and “Needs” so that they would have a tool to evaluate their creations. (The Criteria List is like having another teacher in the classroom. I tell teachers that when their students want to know if what they are doing is “right,” just point to the list and ask them to read it themselves to see if they have met the criteria. This ensures that students learn the vocabulary that their teacher wants them to learn.)

      At the Smithsonian, four hours later, Frank asked the students what they wanted to do with the “instant City” they had built.

      “Tear it down!” was the response.

      I was horrified. Trash their City? That went against everything that I had been taught about having students value their work. I worried, too, about how the students might reuse this experience in the future. But the kids tore into what they had built, screaming with high-pitched glee, and when Frank asked if they wanted to build another one, the answer was a loudly enthusiastic, “YES!”

      “Do you think it will be better?” he asked. Another resounding, “YES!”

      It struck me then that the destructive forces in nature are germinal to creation, and that if I were truly serious about teaching kids to think creatively, allowing them to “destroy” and then revise their original products—after an evaluation—could be central to their refinement of their own creative works.

      I've never forgotten those gleeful shouts that day at the Smithsonian. When the same vocal enthusiasm occurs in Design-Based Learning classrooms, as students build, and then revise and refine their solutions to Design Challenges, it is invariably the harbinger of deliberate creative action.

      Psychologist Abraham Maslow, creator of Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs, said, “If you only have a hammer, you tend to see every problem as a nail.” The flip side is that if you're taught to think creatively, you invent another tool to solve the problem. This tenet is fundamental to my method of Design-Based Learning.