Online shopping? A+!
Sixth graders create dress-code-friendly site in CIC class
Photo: Anna Harbert
A closet stands packed with options for Students to wear to school. Sixth graders Bess White and Eleanor Peters made a website to help students find dress-code-appropriate clothing.
St. George’s students know that following the dress code is a struggle, especially for girls. “Is this skirt long enough?” “Are these pants too tight?” The questions go on and on.
Sixth-graders Bess White and Eleanor Peters wanted to help their peers find the answers to these questions, so they created a website called “SGIS Girls Dress” in order to help girls find clothing appropriate enough for school. Their website was their answer to a project for their Critical Thinking, Innovation and Communication (CIC) class, a sixth-grade course that focuses on problem-solving and communication throughout the school.
“The dress code is sort of hard to understand,” Peters said. “It was hard to find things, so we made the website, and we put the links to the stores.”
CIC teacher Mrs. Mim Brown said that students have a lot of room for creativity when designing their projects. After being assigned the prompt, students set out and observed different issues in the school, ranging from dress code to practice space for sports and trailblazing clubs.
“It becomes a lot of self-teaching, and that’s what’s so cool because they are so interested, and they are learning at their own pace,” Mrs. Brown said.
After designing their website, Peters and White received some tips and suggestions for improvement from their classmates.
“They had to understand that in the design process, you are not going to get it right the first time,” Mrs. Brown said. “You have to be willing to put something out there and get that criticism.”
For the project, students chose their issue, a plan for completing their project and a hypothetical prototype. Peters and White created the website and launched the clothing collection on their own.
“It was 100 percent their brain child. I had no idea what that website was,” Mrs. Brown said. “They totally did everything. All I would say was, ‘Oh that’s really good! Keep going!’”
Although it was a school project, Peters and White had loads of fun, and their final product is available at http://eleanorbess.wix.com/sgisgirlsdress for all to see.
“It was fun!” Peters said. She jokingly added, “It was pretty easy because we just had to online shop the whole time.”
