Upper Loop Updates: Pre-Spring Break Edition

By Jarret Voytilla / February 23, 2024 / Upper Loop Updates, Learning Designers

We have a few updates to share with the community this week from our amazing team of Learning Designers.

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House Your Home (with Yi Lin & Joseph)

Last week, learners joined the Urban Studies Lab at FREC Bangkok to visit two communities in Nang Loeng and Wat Sommanat.
First, they heard from the facilitators about the key findings from the Urban Poverty Alleviation project in the context of the Nang Loeng community.
Learners then went on a walking tour to immerse themselves in the daily lives of the people in the neighborhood and explored affordable housing projects to understand the issues faced by the local population.
Learners also visited the Bangkok city center map at Benjakitti Park to get an overview of the park.
This week, learners visited Second Chance BKK, a social enterprise that collects and resells items for people in need in the Klong Toey community.
They heard from the Director about how the organization worked and visited the community neighborhood.
After lunch, learners visited Forestias to learn about the commercial perspective of community building through multiple housing developments.
The contrast between the two locations exposed learners to diverse perspectives on land use and housing developments in different areas of Bangkok.

This week in Future Fashion, learners watched their personalized rendition of “We Didn’t Start the Fire.”, which they finalized last week.
This activity was used to generate a ‘pulse of today’ and to get learners thinking about relevant and current causes they could focus on and support through their fashion.
After deciding on what cause they felt most passionate about, the learners explored their cause individually to inform their sketches and gain a better understanding.
With a stronger foundation, they developed and presented a 60-second elevator pitch. These were followed up by peer and LD feedback, leading to an exciting gallery walk which had the learners move through the lab and evaluate their peers’ current progress as depicted in their sketchbooks.

Please continue to donate any unwanted clothes or fabric so we can continue to make our project as sustainable as possible. All donations are greatly appreciated and any not used during the project will be given to Second Chance Bangkok.

The learners in Pre-Calculus are about halfway through the third unit in the AP Pre-Calculus course.
They are building on what they’ve learned about many different function families and their transformations as they consider graphs and models of trigonometric functions.
They work collaboratively, often standing together at whiteboards, to make sense of complex ideas and debate each others’ reasoning.
It is a joy to watch them as they really wrestle with hard concepts and don’t give up until they make sure everyone understands.
not used during the project will be given to Second Chance Bangkok.

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This month we have been wrapping up our mental health unit by creating a podcast or video to highlight a specific diagnosis.
We have learned all about the variety of mental issues people deal with, and how to overcome them in our daily lives.
We had two visits this month from universities, one online from Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA) where our guest shared all about the programs there, and introduced us to their summer programming for high school students, and another from one of the few universities in Bhutan, Royal Thimphu College. They shared what student life is like there, from mixing with royalty, to enjoying the natural setting of their campus in the foothills of the Himalayas.