I had low expectations last month when I donned a hard hat for a tour of the Design Tech High School (d.tech): the first school built on a tech company campus. Once construction is finished, a three-year-old local public high school will move in and educate 500 pupils aged 14 to 18 on Oracle’s Silicon Valley site in a building paid for by the software maker.
From “ed-tech” start-ups to billionaire philanthropists, many digital entrepreneurs are funding education projects in an attempt to better equip the next generation for a changed world. Technology is moving so fast that we don’t know what jobs will be available in the future but most agree that the current education system, designed in the 19th century, will not help students thrive in the 21st.
The d.tech school is unique: students will spend their days in a tech company office park. From January, the high-schoolers will share a conference centre with Oracle staff. This is not an extended version of bring-your-child-to-work day: Oracle workers’ children will not be prioritised and, in fact, the school, which is free to attend, is trying to get permission to select students from poorer backgrounds.
My experience of the company’s cloud application software — a monthly misery tackling its iExpenses process — had not particularly convinced me that Oracle had the potential to inspire a new generation. Nor did the building’s grey and glass façade make it seem a fun place to learn.
But I entered to find a light-filled, flexible space, designed in collaboration with children, teachers and Oracle employees. I was impressed by how the building has creativity at its centre. Instead of a large lecture hall, there is a “design realisation garage”. The garage, so-called because all the best start-ups were founded in them, has a large floor for metalwork, woodwork and circuitry, while, upstairs, students can design and code.
What intrigued me the most, however, was that Oracle believes its staff will learn just as much from the schoolkids as students will from the workers. Instead of finding the noisy teenagers a disturbance, Colleen Cassity, executive director of the Oracle Education Foundation, believes they could help disrupt working practices in a good way. “Instead of [our employees] going back to school, the school is coming to them,” she says.
Oracle and the students are already working together to create an internship programme and the teens could even end up leading design challenges for the company. Eventually, Oracle wants to connect each of its campuses with a school.D.tech follows a theory pioneered by Stanford’s design school.
The method focuses on solving problems and building empathy for your users, thinking always of how to design for their needs. Ken Montgomery, co-founder of d.tech, tells me that at Stanford, where he did his PhD, MBA students often start with “constraints in their head” and need to be shaken up to encourage “wild ideas”. Teaching high-schoolers, he has to do the opposite. “Working with kids, we have to get [them] to think about the constraints, because they believe everything is possible.” For example, the school did not agree to the kids’ wish to install a zip line and a rooftop pool on the campus.
One example of balancing kid-like instincts with adult-like constraints is a wearables project that a group worked on at the high school. A 14-year-old girl presented a problem: her partially sighted grandmother couldn’t distinguish between denominations of dollar bills. Her team created a wearable device that scanned the notes for their underlying colour — and played a different song for each one. Now her grandmother can hear the Mario Kart tune every time she grasps a $5 note.
As an employee, I’m unsure that I would want my serene shuttle to work turned into a school bus. But as an Oracle user, I would welcome a kid’s fresh approach. Perhaps the company can ease the tedium of filing expenses by playing a Mario Kart tune each time I enter a claim for a taxi ride. I can only hope Oracle’s adult minds will be opened by the children on campus.
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