What is ideating? Ideating is a core stage in the creative problem-solving process where you generate a wide range of ideas without judgment of good or bad ideas and think of all the different aspects of your problem. It emphasizes quantity over quality to unlock diverse and innovative solutions. During ideation, various techniques such as brainstorming, and mind mapping. This phase is extremely important for exploring all possible avenues for solving a problem, and setting the groundwork for later stages where ideas are refined and implemented.

Top 20 ideas 

1) Create an app which makes a direct line of communication between the parents and

teachers

2) Return parent teacher conferences

3) Regular emails

4) Parent notification systems for late assignments

5) Send out upcoming schedules to parents with future assignments

6) Outdoors Day

7) Online portfolio of students work viewable by parents and includes missing assignments

8) Invite parents to come to the classroom for a presentation

9) Phone calls to parents

10) Notes sent to parents

11) Get input from parents about their children’s schooling

12) Make sure that multiple languages are provided with school info so all parents can stay

in the loop

13) Social events for parents

14) PTA speaking events (parents)

15) PTO speaking events (teachers)

16) Class website open to parents

17) Conferences led by the students to showcase work in their classes

18) Teacher blog open to the parents

19) Social media groups like a community on Facebook

20) Surveys that can be filled out by parents and then sent to teachers

This idea generation process was very impactful because we were able to think of good and bad ideas which greatly widened our perspective on the issue and made us think of things we may not have thought of before. After careful consideration we were able to narrow these twenty options down into the top three contenders. Those three ideas he liked the most were an app, outdoors day and a teacher blog open to parents. Obviously we went with the getaway which evolved into The Koinonia Project. Initially this idea was going to be a one day event where all the students got to spend the day outside enjoying themselves. The students were initially only going to spend the day just outside the school. It was very basic and only to the extent that we wanted the students outside to enjoy the weather. After a lot of changes we finally decided that a one day event was not nearly enough and isolation from society would be necessary to really get the messages across that we hoped to instill in these students. 

 

At The Koinonia Project we believe that the main reason for discourse within the high school system is the overall lack of community. It is clear based on the information above that many people feel the schooling system is not doing its job as effectively as they could. Seeing that only 2% of participants in this survey feel that very little needs to be changed about the schooling system is a very alarming number. Something needs to be changed about how the students perceive their schooling and The Koinonia Project will be the perfect tool in giving these students to tools they need to excel in their schooling and life.

Our main goal has always been to improve the well-being of all our participants. We went through various different ideas and approaches to achieve this goal. To come up with our final idea, which is Koinonia, our first step was to put out all the ideas we had so we could see which of them could best fit our goal. The initial idea we had was to create an app that would connect teachers and parents more closely. The thought process behind this was that if parents had the option to intervene in their child’s schooling more they would jump at the opportunity to talk with teachers, find tutors and also look at the overall school academic layout. In theory this idea was great since based on the feedback we received parents and teachers would be interested in a new line of communication between the two parties. 

It also became apparent to us that unfortunately parents would most likely not utilize this option. In the High School system at the moment parents have opportunities to get in connection with teachers through various methods and still communication is down. Maybe in theory the app could have helped families that lack communication with their children’s schooling but in the end we felt that an impactful emotional experience would leave a much longer lasting impact. 

In the early stages of this project we felt that a competition based event between students could indeed be impactful to them. This idea was originally fleshed out to the point of having an outside competition day. Competition is something that all students can understand and get behind so it would force the young community to work together in ways that were not previously existent. We loved the idea of competition so much that it managed to make its way into our final decision with the Koinonia getaway. While the senior trip is much more emotionally based the younger groups like the freshman will have a very competition based trip. The students will be forced to work together as a team building community and social awareness with their peers.