The NS Sandboxes are excited to announce the return of their summer bootcamp program! The Creativity and Innovation Bootcamp is designed to provide post-secondary students from across the province with an opportunity to discover more about their own ability for creating unique and impactful responses to real-world challenges.

Dates for 2018: Sunday April 29th, 2018 to Friday, May 11th 2018

Over two weeks students will participate in an immersive (full-time) experience that will introduce them to a suite of approaches, tools and mindsets that will unleash their creative potential and amplify their capacity for innovative problem solving. At the core of the program is design thinking (also referred to as human-centred design).

Human-centred design offers problem solvers of any stripe a chance to design with communities, to deeply understand the people they’re looking to serve, to dream up scores of ideas and to create innovative new solutions rooted in people’s actual needs.

 

Through interactive workshops, learning games, independent experimentation and exploring the world outside the classroom, participants will apply their design thinking skills to a central design challenge that will tackle an issue facing Nova Scotia communities.

Program Overview

Week #1: April 29th–May 6th (including the weekend of May 5-6)

• Everyone checks into residence @ Acadia University on Sunday, April 29
  Community building activities to ensure the foundations for collaborative innovation are solid.
• Introduction to human-centred design through cases (stories from the real world) and a full-day simulation.
• Launch of the Design Challenge that will guide program activities
  Focus on “Inspiration” – where do innovative ideas come from…understanding people and behavior before the problem.
• Early “Ideation” – use your new insights about human behavior and the collaborative potential of interdisciplinary teams to brainstorm hundreds of potential ‘solutions’ to the design challenge

Week #2: May 7th–May 11th

• Iteration! Engage in numerous activities that allow your ideas to grow and evolve.
  Build digital storyboards for the idea(s) you’re most excited about and present these storyboards to the bootcamp community.
• Experience what it’s like to build hybrid ideas – taking the most interesting features of different ideas to build a new idea!
• Work with our delivery team to discuss how to incorporate the bootcamp experience into your career development plans – cover letters, interviews and resumes.

Highlights

• You are paid to participate! That’s right…we understand your time is valuable and the summer months are often critical for generating income to pay for school next year. In order to make it possible for you to participate we are offering everyone a $1000 stipend + travel.
• You apply as an individual and we’ll assign you to a team when you get here.
• This is a full-time, residential program – everyone is living in Wolfville, NS for the duration of the program. In order to participate you need to be able participate in the entire program. This element is important as it allows you to create a powerful, creative, collaborative community – ideal for innovative problem solving. Accommodation, meals and travel to/from Wolfville are covered for all participants.
• The program is relevant to students from all academic disciplines – in fact, it’s necessary that we have a vibrant collection of expertise and perspective at the program.
• This is more than a two-week summer camp. Skills developed in this bootcamp are in high-demand by employers and start-up companies alike. In addition to developing your skills in human-centred design, we’ve developed a program that will allow you to practice and develop skills related to collaboration, creative problem solving, communication and networking. We’ll work with you throughout the program to ensure you’re comfortable talking about how your bootcamp experiences are relevant to any place of work.

Application

Space is limited in this program so please complete the following form to apply. Additional information about the program will be disseminated directly to all who are accepted.

Application deadline is Wednesday, April 4th at 4:00 pm

The application for can be found here