The Power Within: The Harbour School Foundry Internships - April 2025

One of the Center Of Excellence’s [COE] at The Harbour School is the Foundry. This facility harnesses unwritten pathways for all that pass through the facility. Expressions of wonderment, creative possibility, historical memories, safety concerns, and curiosity present from young and old alike. 

We frequently hear wishes that this facility was available in schools that others went to. 

As Foundry facilitators, we speak with pride, aligned excitement, and passion with what might be in such a heavily resourced and progressive environment.

Scheduled classes across all grades spend at least one "Intensive" period through the school year interacting with an array of experiential projects, ranging from designing/building/applying Quadrant devices, recognizing and replicating; Xian referenced early man constructional tools, identifying community needs and designing/building needed products to empathizing, designing and crafting larges scale Xylophone/Djembe storage systems for our THS music department. 

All of this is fabulously exciting, and we actively reflect and iterate our operation to increasingly incorporate sustainability, purposefulness, and authenticity into our project designs. We know that the construction, maker, and building environment is not for everyone and that some students shy away from the unwritten, frequently noisy, hands-on challenges. We acknowledge and respect that reality across the visitors to our space.

We also realize that the Foundry is a favourite place for others. A space where one can build stuff, be noisy, use tools, design, craft and test prototypes, learn/apply design and engineering practices, and make bespoke products for others — a world of creativity, unwritten possibility, materials, tools, machines and your hands. It's a cool place to do extraordinary things and is a happy place for many.

The high school leadership agreed to align interested students with the Foundry so that they could work as interns in one of two offered programs. Students identify repeating times that they can visit the Foundry, request approval from the HS admin and Foundry, and ultimately spend extensive time in the Foundry to develop knowledge, skills and experience within their internship interest. The internships run through, and hopefully across, school years..
 
The Harbour School Foundry Makerspace Internship finds students developing experience, knowledge and skills associated with the operational and technical processes involved in running a heavily resourced maker space. 

The Tech Know Wise [TKW] Internship sees students develop entertainment technology knowledge, skills and experience associated with the theatrical usage of light, projection, and sound.

The internships offered through the Foundry see high school students working on various tasks relevant to their interests and focus. 

One of our students was known to be working at home, developing wood carving skills on a small scale with a desire to carve a Dolphin from a solid block of wood. Becoming a Foundry intern and having frequent and facilitated access to the Foundry, where project options scaled up, greatly fed technical knowledge and skill, confidence, pride, skill and belonging. 

A TKW intern had an eye-opening 'ah ha' moment as they realized the creative potential of customizing digital geometric shapes, assigning them to a multi-projection system and sequencing visual media, still or moving, to be displayed as designed. 
It is a massively influential communication opportunity.

All of the internships incorporate Design Thinking, collaborative behaviour, creative and critical thinking and the development of a growth mindset.

The knowledge, skill, and experience required to support the width of student needs, questions, ideas, and thinking are, in reality, vastly overwhelming. Recognition of this, plus a portion of knowledge, skill, and experience, added to our sincere comfort with facilitating, curiosity, persistence, progress, details and all that goes along with progressing,  means we all move forward immensely through our efforts.  

We take pride in ensuring the student's use of time and focus is authentic and purposeful and resides in their area of passion, interest and curiosity.
It does for us in the Foundry.

Please feel free to drop by The Harbour School Grove Campus to visit the Foundry. It might be noisy, busy and very active, but that is only a good thing.