Kids at Barrows and Waterman Elementary schools faced schoolmates, parents, teachers, and a panel of professional architects on December 20 to pitch their ideas for furniture for the new Gladstone Building. Prizes for best designs were given out, one for kindergarten second grade and one for third to fifth at each school, totaling four projects that may actually be built and integrated into their new school after Barrows and Waterman combine again in the new Gladstone Elementary.

“The district asked us to do this because they know that there’s going to be an opening in two to three years,” Nathan Strenge, an organizer of the event, explained. “They wanted to have kids have an opportunity to create something that would actually be built and be put into the school.”

The Shark Tank was the culmination of a six week project based learning program organized by Fielding International, the architecture firm responsible for the design of Garden City and Eden Park elementaries. Strenge and Marlene Watson, learning designers, coordinators of the program, and two of the Shark Tank judges, have visited Cranston every couple of weeks for the last month and a half to teach kids about what goes into a design project from beginning to end.

“We went out with our kids from both schools in early November,” he said. “And then we created all the lesson plans that teachers then took in and facilitated over the course of six weeks. It was about two lessons a week that they were doing. So they did some research on different types of furniture like chairs and tables and nooks.”

“Eventually, they started working with pitches,” he continued. “And Marlene did a lot of the beginning of pitches that were like exemplars for things they could learn from like what makes a good pitch, how do you communicate it?”

Every class in every grade of both schools participated, and they were encouraged to follow their creativity, while also learning about the realities of such concepts as “functionality” and “aesthetic pleasantness.” Those are concepts one might not think kids of a certain age would be able to engage with, but you’d be surprised!

“They were allowed to go wild,  but surprisingly, the feasibility is there in a lot of the items,” said Michael Orsi, a carpenter with Cole Cabinet, a firm tasked with actually building the winning designs. “If it’s not super feasible, it can. It can be tweaked, to the point where we get it back to the real world, but it still gets their vision across.”

Principal Amy Vachon of Barrows Elementary School, who acted as MC for the Shark Tank, was proud of what her littlest could accomplish. She spoke eagerly about some of her youngest winners, a kindergarten class who designed what they call the “Rainbow Zen Zone.”

“They are (multi-language learner) sheltered kindergarten classrooms. So I’ve got a lot of newcomers learning English in the classroom.  So they worked together and they were able to create a video for us and give their feedback on why they thought that this was an important piece to have in their classroom.”

The piece in question is called the “Rainbow Zen Zone.” It’s a tower, and a slide, and a little reading nook. Smartly painted and built from cardboard, the prototype looks a bit like a bright red elephant. According to Orsi, the design is sound and he should be able to make it just fine. Vachon is more concerned with the kids’ communication skills.

“They really did a good job and that was all on them,” she said. “They were able to express why they needed it. They wanted a slide that could help for recess time, or for them to come down. So they really were able to articulate the pieces that were important for that both in the classroom and for other points in their day.”

The Project Based Learning behind the Shark Tank achieved quite a few things. It brought the school together, taught the kids teamwork, project management, communication skills, and encouraged them to use their imaginations to constructive ends. That’s all pretty valuable stuff. But getting to walk into your brand new elementary building and see waiting for you a piece of furniture that you designed waiting inside for you, that’s priceless.

Correction: Finegold Alexander Architects is the chief architectural firm in charge of Gladstone Elementary.