To challenge students, math teacher Liesa Klyn and Northwestern graduate student Christopher Bayston used resources from Northwestern, new teaching techniques and recent renovations to science, technology, engineering, art and math (STEAM) rooms to rethink the classroom experience.

The “good neighbor, great university” initiative, which was furthered in 2012 when the Northwestern/ETHS Partnership office opened, bridges the relationship of high school and college.

“The partnership office has really been critical in helping develop this course because the inspiration for this course comes from work that they are doing in Northwestern,” Klyn said.

The class is a model of how NU and ETHS work together. One of the ways the schools started to work together is through the P.I.P fellowship, where a graduate student from Northwestern teaches full time in the class.

STEAM Innovation and Design Thinking has been an official course at ETHS for one year. With all the new resources available, the teachers are trying to change a students classroom experience.

“A lot of education experiences teach kids to avoid risk. You want to get the right answer and make sure you finish it,” Klyn said. “We present the students very broad issues and then from there the students go through a design thinking process in order to come to a solution that is human centered.”