Leonardo’s Notebooks at Blue Sky School
The Aletheia Guild and the learners at Blue Sky School are teaming up on a unique project to crowdfund the purchase of locally hand-crafted notebooks. Grounded in the core philosophy of Blue Sky School, the project is learner-directed from multi-media content creation for the crowdfunding campaign “Leonardo’s Notebooks”, the campaign’s social media promotion and notebook production.
The notebooks will be used by Blue Sky School learners in the Spring 2019 term. The notebooks will serve as a tool for the learners in recording their creative process (ideation, thoughts, impressions, observations, etc). They are encouraged to do so in the spirit of Leonardo da Vinci whose handwritten notes and drawings played a crucial role in the generation of his creative works. Besides the use of the notebooks for creative thinking purposes, they can also serve as a useful project management planner. In the end, it will be up to the Blue Sky School learner to customize and adapt the notebook for their personal use.
Crowdfunding Campaign
A GoFundMe campaign “Leonardo’s Notebooks” was launched in Feb 2019 to make this project a reality . The campaign’s $1,000 goal will cover the production costs for personalized notebooks for each of the 20 Blue Sky School learners with an additional 10 Blue Sky School branded notebooks.
The campaign’s story content was entirely produced by the learners (text, video and images). And in keeping with the school’s emphasis on project-based learning the entire campaign was student-directed.
Success
Having surpassed the crowdfunding campaign goal with the support of amazing donors, we were able to proceed with the design and production of the personalized notebooks. Each learner was encouraged to come up with their own ideas for customizing their notebook covers as well as experimenting with a user-friendly online design app (Gravit Designer) to create their digital designs.
Once the digital designs were finalized, Adam proceeded with the laser etching of the notebooks as pictured below.
We were pleased to be able to present to the learners at Blue Sky School their individual notebooks as the end of the school year drew near. It was great to see the reactions of the learners as they received their notebooks!
Congratulations to all the learners at Blue Sky School and thanks to Adam Wilk at Makerspace North for making this project a terrific success!
About Blue Sky School
Blue Sky School is an innovative not-for-profit independent school in Ottawa that develops the next generation of changemakers. Our individualized education model empowers students to discover and explore their passions and includes partnerships with today’s innovative leaders in a variety of industries.
By building our innovative school as a prototype, we inspire people locally and globally to re-imagine schooling and learning and challenge assumptions. We believe deeply in young people and create the space for them to uncover passions, dream blue sky dreams and support them in their personal learning journeys.
About Aletheia Guild
The Aletheia Guild functions as an enterprising collective of individual creatives inspired by art-science collaboration. Located at Makerspace North.
About Northbound Notebooks
Northbound Notebooks is all about hand-crafted leather notebooks. Our products are Canadian made, featuring refillable vellum paper. Learn more about Northbound’s founder Adam in this interview. Located at Makerspace North.
