How a 9th grade class launched one Bay student’s idea into a business
As a 9th grader, Gus ’27 had made the Bay sailing team and was learning to sail a boat called an FJ. And he couldn’t stop thinking about the fact that an important element of these otherwise well-designed boats was worse than an afterthought. The back of the boat has a drainage hole for when the boat takes on water, but the plug for the drain that comes standard on FJs? A tennis ball. Why, Gus wondered, would they use something that gets heavy when wet, creates drag, and doesn’t even look good? Thanks to Bay’s Creative Process class, he decided to toss the tennis ball and come up with a better solution.
All 9th graders take the Creative Process, a foundational class that introduces the concepts of design thinking and gets students “bending, blending, and breaking” ideas. From day one at Bay, they develop the skills of generating, riffing on, and refining ideas, skills that keep their minds flexible and serve way beyond academic courses. One of the projects is to take something—could be an object, could be a process—and reinvent it. When Gus’s class, taught by David Friedlander Holm, got to the reinvention project, he knew that he wanted to reinvent the plug.
With help from David and Bay’s tech office, Gus developed and 3D-printed a prototype. It was an interesting idea but presented quite a few technical challenges. Fast-forward 18 months, collaboration with other sailors, and a lot more prototypes, and Gus now has a finished product that can be manufactured. It was good enough for the St. Francis Yacht Club to let him install the plugs on their Junior Sailing program boats, and is starting to get picked up by sailing clubs throughout the United States.
The Creative Process is the start of Bay’s four-year Project Arc, which builds student skills in sustained project work and design thinking. Learn more about the Creative Process.
