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Much of that record comes from SCADpro, the university’s collaborative innovation studio, where SCAD students tackle real problems for companies including Google, BMW and Disney. PRO 340 adapts that experience for high school students for the first time. SKILLS FOR AN UNCERTAIN FUTURE Sabina Schwedtmann-Lynch, Dean of Academics at LAS, has seen first hand how quickly the ground shifts. Five years ago, launching the school’s entrepreneurship programme, she told parents their children needed to learn to code and understand networks. “With AI, within the blink of an eye, that changed,” she says. What has not changed, she argues, is a different kind of skill: the ability to take intellectual risks, spot a problem, and work it through with a team. PRO 340 was designed to build those skills before university begins. Dr Gökhan Özaysın, who led the team behind the course at SCAD, sums up its purpose in one word: transformation. “Through PRO 340, students learn to transform challenges into opportunities, information into insights, insights into ideas, and concepts into solutions,” he says. Those skills, he adds, matter as much to a future entrepreneur or business leader as to a future designer. PRO 340 combines ten levels of university- standard content with a real SCADpro case study at each level, including one project SCAD students completed for a global construction equipment manufacturer, showing how the design process works professionally. Alongside these case studies, students run their own projects under teacher supervision: small local businesses in the first term, then a live brief from Crescent Gardens, a Miami based planter manufacturer, in the second. The process takes them from understanding a challenge and researching it to developing, testing and presenting ideas, earning three micro- credentials along the way, in teamwork, visual presentation and project based thinking. WHAT HAPPENS IN THE CLASSROOM?
Successful completion brings five SCAD course credits, counting towards a SCAD degree, and a minor in business collaboration, if students later choose to study there. NOT JUST FOR CREATIVE TYPES The course is deliberately not presented as an arts elective. Students are treated as “junior designers”, whether or not they see themselves as creative. “There’s such depth and breadth to the class that it shouldn’t appeal only to those heading towards an arts, design, or entrepreneurship career,” Schwedtmann- Lynch says. Demand at LAS was higher than expected. LAS had planned for two classes but opened a third once word got around; roughly a quarter of its oldest students enrolled. For parents, an obvious question is whether a course taught in a school can match the real thing. SCAD addresses this through training: before teaching PRO 340, LAS teachers completed a week long programme at SCAD’s Lacoste campus in France, earning formal credentialling, a safeguard Özaysın says keeps the experience true to SCAD’s standards wherever it’s taught. KEEPING STANDARDS CONSISTENT
PRO 340 lies in preparing students for a world that none of us can map in advance. “The skills PRO 340 imparts, the ability to take intellectual risks, identify problems, iterate through them, work together, establish yourself in teams of experts, that’s what real life is,” she says. “We’re teaching them how to go out into the world, regardless of the business they’re in, and find ways to be successful.” FUTURE DEVELOPMENT Both institutions see this as a starting point. SCAD plans to introduce PRO 340 at more schools in the United States and beyond, giving more students the chance to experience university-level design thinking before they leave school. For the students at Leysin, that opportunity is already taking shape, one real-world challenge at a time. Sabina Schwedtmann-Lynch is Dean of Academics at Leysin American School, where she founded the Changemakers entrepreneurship programme. Dr Gökhan Özaysın is Senior Vice President for Academic Quality at SCAD and led the team that created PRO 340. The Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD) is a private, accredited, nonprofit university founded in 1978, with locations in Savannah and Atlanta, Georgia, and Lacoste, France, offering undergraduate and graduate degrees in art, design and related fields. www.scad.edu Leysin American School (LAS) s a family-run international boarding school in the Swiss Alps, founded in 1961, offering the International Baccalaureate, Advanced Placement courses and a US high school diploma. www. las.ch
PREPARING FOR REAL LIFE For Schwedtmann-Lynch, the value of
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