Luke Harris on Problem Finding in High School

You’re listening to the Getting Smart podcast. I’m Mason Pasha and today I’m joined by a very special guest, Luke Harris. Luke is a junior at Horace Mann High School and has described himself as enjoying taking things apart and not quite getting them back together. For the past two years, he has been developing design engineering curriculum for kids, created

to teach real world entrepreneurial and engineering skills. Luke, thanks so much for being here today. Thanks so much for having me. I wanted to kick off with your own icebreaker that you sometimes use. So what’s your favorite product or service and why?

My favorite product, I would say, I like phone cases a lot because I think they’re really interesting because they wouldn’t really exist if we didn’t have phones. They solve a very specific problem that another product creates. I think that web of products and problems that products create is really interesting to explore.

Love that. There are so many different kinds that serve different needs and lifestyles too, which is great. So when did you get started with your interest in products and what was the first product that you actually created or tinkered with?

When I was a kid, I used to really like Legos a lot. I used to mess around with them, make little door stops, hold doors open, or make little spikes and put them next to my sister’s room or make spaceships and stuff. But the first products that I really started making were at school in science. We would work with robotics kits.

So we’d make little monkey robots which could climb across a string or a robot which could pick something up and put it into a box. So that was really when I started thinking of things that actually do something. At what point in that process did you start to think about product as more of a design process?

Where there was actually, it wasn’t just about building. Where there was steps before that, steps after that as well. Well, two years ago and during my freshman year of high school, I got the opportunity to go to a Harvard biotech lab. And while I was there, I saw a glove which was used to help rehabilitate stroke victims.

So basically it had some cushions and some pockets which filled with air which helped the person grip and essentially rehabilitated like a muscle aid almost. And I was thinking about it and I said, well, they didn’t say, wow, look at this cool looking glove. I wonder what we can use it for.

They said, there are people with stroke. They’re having a hard time recovering. How can we create a gentle device to help them rehabilitate and really solve a problem? They found a problem and then they worked towards a solution instead of starting with just a cool thing and then working backwards.

Love that. Yeah, that’s a pretty good place to learn about that process. So that’s super cool. You have that experience. I feel like a lot of this stuff that you’ve kind of explored and learned has been, it’s

been a fortune of going to the school that you go to, but I do feel like there’s a lot of sort of DIY stuff that you’ve taught yourself over the years. What are some of the things that you do feel like you’ve sort of had to teach yourself to supplement your school experience? One of the things at least that I found with school is that it’s really good at teaching

you how to do something, but sometimes it doesn’t really teach you why you do the thing that you do. So I learned in school how to build a thing. I learned how to solve a trigonometry equation, but I never really learned for engineering why I’m building the things, why we build bridges, why we build roads, why we build phones,

the way we build them. So teaching myself, sort of those principles on why, basically design principles on why we build things and the way we build things was really the, I feel like the most important thing I had to teach myself. Yeah, definitely.

I relate with school being good at the how and not the why. So where do you think, at Getting Smart we talk a lot about how that kind of impulse to look further or draw something on your own is sort of called agency and student agency is one of the most important things to build going into the future where there’s so much uncertainty and so many complex and novel problems.

Where do you think your sense of agency came from and how have you sort of nurtured it over the years? Well, when I was younger, I always really loved, I was always very social, but one of the things that comes with being social as a kid is you’re basically always playing games. You know, kids don’t like to sit around and talk all day.

So I always had to sort of come in, find a group of kids and say, all right, we’re going to play this game and just make up a game on the spot. And I feel like being sort of left to that sort of space of you need to just, you have a problem, you just need to solve it. Otherwise, it’s just not going to be fun.

Led me to really take those problem solving skills in my own hands and say, well, what’s the, what are some games that I played in the past, which I can play right now? And then when I went to school, it was like, what is the best way for me to like carry around a binder or what is, what is the best way to put my files into a backpack? It was always just, I have a problem.

What’s the way I can solve it? That’s super cool. Yeah. And you were mentioning before we were recording, but just like your sort of your love of kind of all things games in general.

So that’s kind of fun to hear that that started so young and you were creating them even then. There’s another thing we talk about a lot, which is really like flipping the script from problem solving to problem finding, which is like both of them. It’s not one or the other. It’s both of them.

But we kind of skip over the problem findings part a lot of the time. And that has a little bit to do with what you’re saying about the how versus the why piece. But I’d love to hear you just kind of riff on problem finding as a concept and like when you started to realize there’s like a, there’s a blog that you wrote that’s going to be accompanying this podcast and you kind of call out like the, the cup that changes the

color when it’s cold. And you’re like, I’m not sure that’s really a problem that’s found. Like you can touch the cup to figure it out. So I’d love to hear just like your thoughts on problem finding and some of your early experiences with that.

Well, when I was maybe seven or eight, my family always used to watch Shark Tank just because that was what was on when we were eating dinner. And you know, when you’re a kid and you see the thing on TV, you’re like, oh, I bet I can do that. That was always what me and my family were at least me, me and my sister were always

thinking. So we were watching Shark Tank and my sister was like, Hey, I want to be on the show. I want to be an entrepreneur. And then my dad was like, okay, cool. So what are you going to bring on the show?

And then we both sort of stopped and we’re like, well, what are you going to bring on the show? Because you don’t really think, you don’t really think about products in the way that they’re a problem. They’re a solution to a problem.

Every product ends up being something that is a solution. So when you’re an entrepreneur, you basically find a problem that you have and then you solve it. And that was sort of the Eureka moment, which is like everything in my life, everything in the world basically is just a solution to some problem.

Yeah, that’s super true. And this is an interesting thing that you do that I think is really smart where you sort of tie this problem solving directly into engineering. Like I think that it is sort of easy to just like pretend to be the solutions guy and our girl and just like come into a room and just think that you have it

all down. But I like that you wrote it particularly in engineering. And you’ve developed a curriculum around sort of like the design engineering intersection and sort of how we can talk about these things better. So what was sort of the impetus for creating this curriculum?

Well, for me, the main impetus was like I talked about earlier. I went to this Harvard lab and I realized that engineering was much more about finding a problem and then solving it instead of just making something cool. Well, as fun as that is. And basically I worked as a teaching assistant at a kid’s robotics camp and

I’ve taken I was on a robotics team. I’ve basically done a lot of robotics and engineering. And at no point during that was it really phrased to me like you’re trying to solve a problem, but it was always just how can we do this? Like how can we make a robot that can move forward or how can we make a carousel robot?

And I feel like reorienting engineering to be about problem solving would, A, make it more applicable to life in general because everyone’s going to need to solve problems, but also B, would make kids better engineers. It would teach them not only how to make an idea into reality, but also how to get an idea in the first place.

For sure. And I think a lot of some society at large is sort of coming to terms with this right now. But a lot of that early evaluation is really about tradeoffs and like who you’re kind of harming or what you’re harming and by creating something. So it’s like obviously the most trivial version is like the cup that changes colors.

Like that doesn’t really harm anyone. That’s not really important. It’s just unnecessary. But at a certain point, your design process does hurt or leave people out or like damage the climate or whatever.

So I’m curious how you kind of think about those as factors in your design process. And if that occupies a certain space for you. Well, when I’m thinking about consequences, I usually like to, you know, start off with what am I doing? Like actually just list what am I doing?

So like when I’m writing with a pencil, I don’t say like I’m putting words on paper. I would say, well, I’m taking the graphite from inside the pen and it’s going on top of the paper in a series of symbols, which I understand and which a reader might understand. And then once you really break it down into its literal parts, it’s at least for me easier to see what is the impact.

Well, I have an impact because I’m impacting the paper. The paper has an impact because it’s getting impacted by me and someone else who’s reading it also has an impact because they’re understanding the symbols. So once you sort of, I find break it down to actually what is literally happening, then at least for me, it sort of becomes easier to see that web of impact.

And while there are some unprecedented consequences, like that example in my blog where I talked about how the, how a country killed all the sparrows because they thought they were vermin, which just led to an exploding insect population, which destroyed all the grain. There are some things which you just like, well, which you can’t really predict as well. But I think literally laying it out in its simplest terms and just saying, well, what

is the impact of this literal action I’m doing makes it a lot easier, at least for me. That’s great. Yeah. And I think you could probably scale that to a lot of different applications. So that’s a good way to think about it.

So walk me through some of the phases of your curriculum. So like kind of what, how it’s broken down. And then like maybe just a couple of the highlights of like what the journey is that a student would go through if being served your curriculum. Well the general premise of the curriculum is essentially find a problem, create a solution,

and then figure out whether your solution actually solves the problem. So I would usually have students start off by just thinking about, well, what is engineering? What is problem solving? And step back and think about the actual process as a whole. How does a product get into my hands from an idea in someone’s head?

And how does that idea get into their head in the first place? And then once they sort of understand engineering more holistically or at least have a better idea of what it looks like holistically, then I would move into the first phase, which is ethnographic research. Basically that’s a term to stolen from anthropology to mean you go and you observe what’s happening

in an engineering, at least in my curriculum that usually manifests itself in going to like a local Starbucks or McDonald’s or a Walmart and just sitting down and watching people and just observing what problems they have. So someone’s struggling to get a cup from the Starbucks or from the cafe into the trashcan. Well that’s a problem right there.

You might need to make the cup smaller, trashcan bigger or rethink the whole process as a whole. And then once you’ve sort of done your observations, then you’ll move into other types of ethnographic research like interviews. So you might go up to someone and say, well, what problems do you think you have today? Because people will tell you what they think they had, but sometimes people don’t actually

know what problems they really have. Once you have found this sort of list of problems people have, I would usually ask students to step back and just choose one and just break it down. So going back to the trashcan example, well, what’s the issue here? The lid might be too heavy to push back, so someone might struggle to get their cup in,

the cup might be too tall so you can’t fit it in vertically and you need to sort of do this weird horizontal motion. The trashcan might be in an inconvenient place, so someone needs to push through the line in order to get there. There are a variety of reasons.

And then once you sort of, I usually start off with the problem and I break it down like a tree. So first there are, so here are some of the reasons why someone’s having an issue getting a cup or what are the reasons for those? Maybe it’s a bad placement of the line.

Maybe it’s a bad consumer base. You’re not thinking about the structure and positioning of the cup based on the people who are buying the cup. Once that’s sort of been broken down at least as far as students are willing to take it and with a little pushing, then I ask students to just focus on one of those because solving

with a whole big issue can be really difficult. So just take, I usually ask students to just take one of them, take one of those root problems and just come up with a solution. And then once they’ve come up with a solution, prototype it, try and implement it, ask people what they think, and then do it again.

So you say, okay, well I’ve gotten what people think. I’ve performed more ethnographic research with my solution. Let’s do it again. Let’s come up with another solution. Let’s come up with some improvements.

And then after you iterate and iterate this process, then you have a final product and that’s generally the outline of the curriculum. That’s awesome. Do you think this curriculum can map on to other subject areas, like aside from just engineering?

Well, whenever I write like an English paper, a history paper, if it’s due in two weeks, I’ll usually start admittedly four days into the two week period and then I’ll write out an outline and then I’ll write a draft and then I’ll go back and I’ll edit it. And then sometimes even with editing, my draft is just totally going down the wrong direction. So I’ll rewrite or I’ll write another outline or I’ll just do more editing.

Same thing in English. And I feel like that sort of iterative process applies really well to many classes in maths. You’re doing proofs often. So sometimes you’ll find yourself just going down the totally wrong path and you just step back and look at the problem more holistically.

English again, reiterating draft, history, same thing sometimes you go down a rabbit hole with your research and you just step back and restart. And with science, experimenting, going in again and again, the scientific method as a whole, it all sort of applies holistically and I’m just trying to take that and boil it down to how can we get like a problem and then how can we make that problem into a good

product that people actually want? What are some problems that you want to solve that maybe you haven’t gotten around to yet or don’t pick up the resources or experience to yet? Well, the first thing, at least in my personal experience that I want to solve is having good backpacks or at least a good method of carrying files and schoolwork around.

Because when I was younger, I used to slouch a lot. And then as my parents basically forced my back to stand straight up, that way I wouldn’t look like the hunchback of Notre Dame. I learned to sort of like self correct and say, OK, I’m slouching a little in my chair. I need to sit back up.

And then when I hit high school and the work really ramped up, my backpack is so heavy that if I stand up normally, I start to fall backwards. So I feel like for me, the first thing that I would want to do is figure out a better way so that way kids can have good posture. Like I’m developing back pain sometimes just from having to carry around like a 15 pound

backpack all day. So that would be the first on my list. But I think more generally, I would like to see a better way to teach kids online because I feel like taking the classroom method and just saying, well, let’s do this online is a quick solution.

So it worked really well in a global pandemic, which literally nobody saw coming. But in future, there are people who like I’ve classmate to have to travel sometimes hours, an hour or two hours to get to school. There’s some people who have immunocompromised parents or immunocompromised siblings. So I think having another option, that online option and a good online option would be really

helpful, especially in a world as digital as ours, where you can tune into a Zoom lecture happening halfway across the country or in halfway across the world. Yeah, definitely. We definitely agree that there’s a needed online option. And there’s some cool programs that definitely exist, but it doesn’t feel like there’s like

a kind of one size fits most situation going on yet. That’s awesome. Do you think what advice or like tips would you give sort of like from the students to like leaders and educators sort of about how to make this process more engaging, more real world applicable?

Just anything in that vein that comes to mind for you. I think there’s sort of, at least for me, there’s sort of two things, one of which is that if you want to have engaging lessons, at least for me, I always like lessons where the student has some skin in the game. Like, I don’t know if you know like Quizlet or Kahoot, but I always loved and I think most

kids love when the teacher pulls out a quiz that are just before a test, because it feels there’s a game you’re competing for something. It feels like you really have something in the lesson. It almost like tricks you into learning. But I think, at least with my curriculum, I try and get kids to feel engaged by making it their

product. The teacher doesn’t come along and say, I want you to design a new mug. The teacher just says, I want you to solve a problem. And that’s so open-ended that it really becomes any student’s product. It doesn’t become a product that they felt forced to make by a teacher. It just becomes something that they wanted to solve.

Yeah, we’ve seen a lot of really cool implementations from kind of gamification companies, particularly in the last decade or so that have started to lean that way for the skin in the game. And I love that you focused on really making the problem, the student’s problem, like it’s not just kind of feeding them what you want them to say back to you.

It is really more about getting to know your students better through the product they create and making something that they can be proud of and share, kind of like start to finish. This was my thing. So I love that. Love the curriculum.

I think it’s great that you saw a need and just acted on it and made it your own thing. So where can people find out more about your curriculum, about what you’re up to? Well, I have a website. It’s called entrepreneurialengineerings.com. And there you can find the full curriculum and lesson plans for about a quarter or a semester.

And you can always reach out to me. My email is harriscyluke at gmail.com. I’m always happy to answer questions about the curriculum. And I love talking about engineering. So you can just email me for fun if you really want.

That’s awesome. All right. Well, thank you so much for joining us today. We really appreciate your insights in engineering, entrepreneurship, and just kind of how to make learning more relevant and fun for young people.

So thanks so much for being here. Thank you for having me. You bet. I’m Mason Pasha and keep learning and keep innovating for equity. Thanks for tuning into the Getting Smart podcast today.

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