“Design Sprint”

Design Sprint with solutions for less dropout in technical educations.

Too few students reach their graduation within the Danish technical schools. To approach this problem in a solution-oriented way, The Rockwool Foundations Intervention Team set up a design sprint. In a design sprint, ideas are developed, tested in practice and selected for implementation on an informed basis.

Participants in the design sprint

A design sprint is a creative format of a week’s duration that opens up for the development of more disruptive and radical ideas while keeping the risk minimal because the ideas are tested within a limited framework. The Rockwool Foundation, in collaboration with Let’s Co, used the design sprint as a catalyst to explore how students can be supported in passing their education – due to numbers showing only around 50% completion. Let’s Co helped to facilitate the design sprint at the Technical School EUC Sjælland (http://www.eucsj.dk), and developed ideas together with both students and teachers

The result was a number of ideas for maintaining the students. Students and teachers were given design tools to pretotype ideas so that they could be tested in situ on a small scale. The tests created the basis for reflection and adaptation of the ideas, and it became clear which ideas had potential and which ideas turned out to be facing too big challenges in practice. This raised awareness for a qualified prioritization between the ideas. At the end of the week, the Rockwool Foundation had a selection of tested ideas for further implementation. In the late summer of 2018, they had three well-conceptualized ideas for maintaining students that 19 different technical schools could see great potential in.

Builders before the design sprint workshop