Sophie Hayssen is a student from New York City and an intern at Clover Letter. After attending TED-Ed Weekend, she wrote about the event. Read Sophie’s letter below:

After years of watching TED videos, I have accumulated many favorite talks whose lessons have stuck with me and changed the way I perceived the world. However, at TED-Ed Weekend, the experience of seeing TED Talks live and by people my own age was more visceral and inspiring than anything I had seen onscreen. In our second workshop of the day, my group was asked to describe what TED meant to them. As one of the few attendees who was not a member of a TED-Ed Club, the Saturday conference was the only experience I had with TED IRL. I thought about the answer to my workshop leader’s question, and asked myself why those morning talks had moved me so much.

I am exposed to ideas daily from interactions with teachers, parents, friends; but what makes some forms of communication more meaningful than others? The best answer I could come up with was that while many of us young people have interesting — or even world-changing — ideas, it can be challenging to express those ideas in ways that effectively reach other people. It’s hard to convey feeling through something as concrete and limited as language, but this is where most of the TED-Ed Weekend talks excelled. Because the talks were so carefully considered and geared toward the audience, I found myself getting excited about topics I had very little knowledge of, or didn’t even know existed before the conference. Even more impressive was how the topics ranged so widely from the importance of loving your natural hair to the benefits of solar energy.

In addition to TED’s power to help students articulate and organize their ideas, TED offers students a unique platform to share their stories. I’ve heard adult after adult complain, either in news articles or in person, about how the art of listening is lost on my generation, but the TED-Ed Clubs format flies in the face of that accusation. As I watched the talks, it was really refreshing to surrender my attention completely to the speaker and not have the pressure of having to respond immediately. Instead, I could just let the talk sink in and process it on my own. This relationship between the audience and the speaker defines the TED experience as both communal and personal. That is what TED means to me.

Author bio: Sophie Hayssen is a student from New York City and an intern at Clover Letter. When she’s not studying, she spends her time wandering aimlessly through bookstores and wasting away her youth watching Netflix. You can read more of her writing here.

Design thinking is both a mindset and a methodology. As a mindset, it’s about putting people at the center of your work. As a methodology, it’s about defining a problem, prototyping rapidly, and then implementing a human-centered design solution. This way of thinking can be used to solve problems, large and small — from designing a new hospital layout to minimize the spread of germs, to creating a new design for a spoon.

In the classroom, design thinking can provide a powerful platform for creative and innovative learning. One tool that can help you teach design thinking skills in a playful and creative way is littleBits. The colorful Bits snap together with magnets, making it a fast and easy way for students to learn how to solve a real-world challenge and invent with electronics.

For example, the Invent For Good Challenge, which focuses on empathy, challenges students to find a problem that’s affecting someone else and come up with a solution to solve it. Using the littleBits Invention Cycle, which draws inspiration from Stanford d. school’s design thinking process (identify a problem, brainstorm ideas to solve it, prototype a solution, test/play with it to see if it works, and learn from your findings to improve it), students are able to quickly invent solutions to address the problem that they’ve identified. Students go through the process, step-by-step, and document what they’re doing as they go along using the littleBits Invention Log. Sharing is also encouraged as an important part of the feedback process; you can view and comment on inventions from creators all around the world on the littleBits invention page. Three amazing examples: 8-year old João from Brazil invented a prosthetic arm, 11-year-old Anahit and her sister from California created a device to help the blind navigate, and middle-schooler Max from Ohio built a smart way to socialize cats.

What will students design, invent, and create in your classroom this year? Let’s find out!

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Art credit: littleBits