We built the Occupied because kids were getting walked in on in the bathroom. It’s terrible. It’s a big problem. . . Our project solves it because it shows everyone when the bathroom “is occupied” (uses his fingers to put the words in quotes). Now you can’t just walk in and pretend you didn’t know. . . I think this is a good problem to solve. I think it will help our community. Especially boys. The girls usually have someone watch the door, but a lot of us don’t.Mateo, 6thgrader
In this quote, Mateo, a 6thgrader, describes the design solution,“The Occupied,” he and two peers prototyped over the course of a six-week STEMunit focused on engineering for sustainable communities.The Occupied is a lighting system that allows classroom members to know when the bathroom is occupied. In his school, each classroom has its own individual bathroom located in the corner of the room, but the bathroom does not lock. The Occupiedhas 3 gumdrop 10mm LED lights in parallel circuit affixed to the wall outside the bathroom door. It uses the bathroom light as a switch to activate the solar panel, which powers the LEDs, connected by 12 meters of copper tape.However, getting to the point of a working prototype was not straightforward for the group. They needed to figure out how to make the design work from a science and engineering standpoint. They needed to garner support from their teacher, Mrs. J., who admitted to being unaware of the bathroom bullying problem, and was skeptical of her students’ abilities to succeed with such a complex project.
How did the three students, their peers and teacher work towards new understandings and relationships which made The Occupied possible, and which shifted how these youth were positioned and valued within the classroom and school community? In our work, we suggest that one possible way to design promote more equitable and consequential STEM learning is by integrating community ethnography as pedagogy as a design approach in teaching and learning STEM. Let’s learn how this works from the youth in their video, The Occupied.