You do not need to be a coder to run this.
F7 is a human-centered design program. Students choose a problem in their own community, talk to real people about it, and build something that helps. Your job is not to know the answer — it is to keep the questions coming and hold the standard high enough that students surprise themselves. Everything here is counted in sessions, not weeks: a session is a unit of work you finish, so a group that needs two sessions for interviews takes two sessions and nobody falls behind a calendar.
Who can facilitate
Classroom teachers, club sponsors, coaches, youth workers, librarians, and program managers. If you can hold a room and stay curious with young people, you can run F7.
What students need
A device with a browser, an internet connection, an email address, and someone in their life willing to be interviewed for twenty minutes.
What you need
A room, a screen or projector, sticky notes and markers, and a recurring block on the calendar. That is the whole materials list.
12 sessions × 75 minutes
The default shape of this playbook. One session per meeting, two sessions per design step, showcase at Session 12 — then straight into a second cycle or a continuation track.
12 sessions × 1 period
Run two sessions per meeting cycle and use a third period as work time. The twelve sessions map cleanly onto a project-based unit or capstone.
12 sessions × 2 per day
Two sessions a day with an extended build block in the afternoon. Compress Empathize to three sessions; protect the full Prototype and Test sessions.
Whatever the format, the finish line is the same: every student publishes something real at a real URL, and every student stands up and explains it.
Students do this work inside the F7 platform, so the playbook and the app use the same words. Here is how it is organized:
Challenge Brief
Where students pick a mission category — Safe & Connected, Health & Healing, Green & Growing, Youth Opportunity — and name the problem they are taking on.
Sprints 1–6
One sprint per design step: Empathize, Define, Ideate, Prototype, Test, Pitch. Each sprint has a guide, suggested tasks, and a task board with To do / Doing / Done.
Task board
Students click to add suggested tasks or write their own, then drag them across the board. Notes and work go inside the task, so you can see progress without asking.
Project workspace
The permanent home for the project: title, story, quotes, problem statement, sources, solution, links. This is what the published project page is built from.
Guides & glossary
Every sprint has a written guide, key terms, and a complete worked example. Assign the guide as pre-reading when a session runs short.
Manager view
Your side: sprint status per student, submitted work, survey results, and downloadable reports for a principal or funder.
Five steps, one real problem.
Design thinking is not a craft class and it is not a worksheet. It is a repeatable way to solve a real problem for a real person: you go find out what is actually hard for someone, say the problem out loud in one sentence, generate far more ideas than you need, build the smallest working version, and put it in a stranger's hands to find out what you got wrong. The same five steps run product teams at NASA, Google, Nike, and IDEO. Teenagers take to it because it starts with something they already have — an opinion about what is broken where they live — and ends with something they can show someone.
It starts with them
Step one is not a lecture, it is a problem the student chose. Ownership comes before instruction, which is why attendance holds.
It makes thinking visible
Every step produces an artifact — quotes, a problem statement, a wall of ideas, a working link, usability notes. You can see the learning instead of guessing at it.
It makes being wrong safe
Testing exists to find flaws. When finding a flaw is the assignment, students stop hiding their work and start improving it.
Who is this for, and what is hard for them?
Students learn about a problem from the people living it instead of from their own assumptions. It is research, done by talking to humans.
- Pick a mission category and a problem they actually care about
- Write open questions and interview at least three real people
- Capture direct quotes, not summaries
- Pull out patterns and surprises across interviews
Interview notes with verbatim quotes, plus two or three insights the student did not expect.
Letting students skip real interviews and describe what they imagine people feel. If there is no quote from a real person, the step is not done.
In the platform: Challenge Brief to choose the mission, then Sprint 1 · Empathize for interview tasks and quote logging.
It loops. It is not a ladder.
Drawn as a line, the five steps look like a staircase you climb once. In practice, Test sends you backward on purpose: a confused user usually means the prototype is wrong (back to Prototype), and sometimes it means the problem was wrong (back to Define). Going back is the process working, not the student failing. Say that out loud the first time it happens to someone, because whoever goes back first will assume they are behind.
"You just learned something it would have taken us three sessions to guess. That is a win, not a setback — where does it send you?"
Twelve sessions cover the cycle: roughly two sessions per step, plus a final showcase session. Groups that need a third session inside a step take it — the checkpoint decides, not the calendar.
How F7 facilitators work.
Ask before you answer
The instinct to fix a student's project is the single biggest threat to their learning. When a student is stuck, your first three responses should be questions. Most of the time they already know — they just haven't said it out loud yet.
"What have you already tried?" · "Who would know the answer to that?" · "What would you do if I weren't here?"
Protect the struggle
Productive difficulty is the product. Students who are confused but moving are exactly where they should be. Step in only when frustration turns into shutdown — and then step in with a smaller next step, not with the solution.
"This part is supposed to be hard. Let's shrink it. What's the smallest piece you could finish in ten minutes?"
Hold the standard
Young people rise to the level of what you refuse to accept. Real interviews, not guesses. A working link, not a screenshot. A pitch they rehearsed, not one they winged. Say it kindly and say it every session.
"I believe you can do better than this, and I'll stay while you do it."
Name the growth out loud
Students rarely notice their own change. Point at it specifically — the second interview was sharper than the first, the problem statement got tighter, they debugged it themselves. Specific praise for a specific behavior is what makes it repeat.
"Back in Session 2 you wouldn't have asked that follow-up question. That was a researcher's move."
Publish everything
A project that lives only on a laptop is a worksheet. A project with a URL is a portfolio piece, a conversation with a parent, a line in a college essay. Publishing early and often changes how seriously students take their own work.
"Ship it ugly today. You can make it good next session — but it goes live today."
Twelve sessions, start to showcase.
Twelve sessions, written for a 75-minute block. Sessions, not weeks: you move to the next one when the checkpoint is met, and a group that needs an extra session for interviews takes it. Every session has the same bones: a short open that sets the stakes, a long work block where you coach instead of teach, and a close where students say out loud what they did and what's next. Each one names exactly where the work lives in the F7 platform, so students are never guessing which screen to open.
The sentences that do the work.
Facilitation is mostly a small set of sentences used at the right moment. These are the ones that carried our first cohort. Steal the language verbatim — it is written to be said out loud, not paraphrased.
The three-question rule
Ask three questions before you offer anything. Most students solve it on question two. If you get to question three and they are still lost, give them the next step — not the destination.
- “What have you tried?”
- “What do you think would happen if you did that?”
- “Who in this room already solved this?”
Shrink the step
Cut the task until it is embarrassingly small, then start a timer. Momentum is a mood, and it comes back the second something is finished.
- “Forget the whole thing. What can you finish in ten minutes?”
- “Just the headline. Nothing else.”
- “Do the ugly version first.”
Redirect to the human
Send them back to the person. Every disagreement about what users want is settled by asking a user — and students remember the answer far longer than they remember your ruling.
- “Who told you that?”
- “Go ask one person and come back.”
- “Let's find out instead of guessing.”
Name the behavior
Praise the move, not the person. "You're smart" teaches nothing. "You asked a follow-up question instead of accepting the first answer" teaches the move.
- “That follow-up question is what researchers do.”
- “You just debugged that yourself.”
- “You cut a feature to protect the deadline. That's a professional call.”
The public checkpoint
Stop everything and go around: one sentence each on what you finished and what's next. Ninety seconds of accountability resets a room faster than a lecture.
- “Pens down. One sentence each.”
- “What's done and what's next?”
Hand it sideways
Pair them instead of solving it twice. Peer teaching is the highest-retention thing that happens in the room, and it takes work off your plate.
- “She solved this last session — go ask her.”
- “You two have the same bug. Fifteen minutes, together.”
Close the loop
Never let students leave without saying what they'll bring back. Spoken commitments in front of peers are kept far more often than written ones.
- “Before you go: what are you bringing back next session?”
Six moments, and what to do.
These six moments happen in every cohort. Knowing the move in advance is the difference between a session that recovers and one that dissolves.
Usually not a shortage of ideas — a fear of picking a wrong one.
Take the pressure off the choice. Tell them the first idea is a draft, not a commitment, and that they can change it after the first interview. Then ask what annoyed them this past week. Annoyance is a reliable idea generator.
Common, and it stalls the whole design step if you let it.
Have a backup list ready before Session 2: front office staff, a coach, a custodian, a librarian, a parent picking up a sibling. Everyone in the building is a potential user of something. Never let a flake cost a session.
The student outsourced the thinking, usually because the task felt beyond them.
Don't punish it — expose it. Ask them to explain the piece line by line in their own words. Where they can't, that's the real work. Then rebuild that piece together with AI as an assistant, not an author.
Comparison, and it hits hardest right after the first showcase of prototypes.
Compare them to their own Session 1 self, out loud and specifically. Then give them one concrete, achievable upgrade to make this session. Progress cures comparison faster than reassurance does.
Finished the core flow early — a real risk to the room's energy if unmanaged.
Two options: go deeper (test with three more users, add the accessibility pass) or go wider (help someone who is stuck). Never let 'done' turn into idle; the fastest students set the room's ceiling.
The student who won't start. Silence usually means fear of being seen failing.
Sit down beside them, not across from them. Lower the stakes to one keystroke. Do the first thirty seconds together, then get up and leave them to it. Follow up privately after the session, never in front of the room.
AI is a thinking partner, not a ghostwriter.
Students will use AI whether or not you address it. The programs that pretend otherwise produce students who can generate work they cannot explain. Name it in Session 1, set the line clearly, and make the line about learning rather than cheating.
If you cannot explain it in your own words, it is not yours yet.
Use it for
- Brainstorming — after the student has generated their own ideas first
- Explaining an unfamiliar concept or error message
- Debugging: "here's what I tried, here's what happened"
- Rewriting the student's own draft for clarity
- Practicing an interview or a pitch out loud
Not for
- Writing the problem statement before any interviews happen
- Inventing research findings or fabricating quotes
- Producing a finished build the student cannot explain
- Replacing conversations with real people
- Generating the reflection about their own learning
- Say the rule out loud in session one and post it on the wall.
- Make explanation the routine, not the exception: every checkpoint asks "walk me through this part."
- Have students note where AI helped in their reflections. Normalizing disclosure kills the incentive to hide it.
- Model it yourself. Use AI in front of them, then show where its answer was wrong.
Met, or not yet.
F7 is not graded in the traditional sense. Each design step has a checkpoint that is either met or not yet met, and 'not yet' is a normal state that gets revisited. What follows is what to look for, and what to show the adults who fund and approve your program.
| Step | Met | Not yet |
|---|---|---|
| Empathize | Three or more real interviews conducted; insights traceable to direct quotes. | Assumptions restated as findings; no named interviewee. |
| Define | One problem statement naming who, what, and why; six cited sources. | A solution disguised as a problem, or a problem too broad to test. |
| Ideate | Thirty ideas generated; one chosen with a written impact/feasibility defense. | One idea, chosen first and never questioned. |
| Prototype | A published URL where the core flow works end to end. | Screenshots, mockups, or a build that only works when the student drives. |
| Test | Three observed tests; three changes traceable to what users did. | Feedback collected as opinions; nothing changed as a result. |
| Showcase | A rehearsed pitch delivered to a non-club audience, with a live link. | Reading slides, or presenting without the product open. |
What to show a principal, a funder, or a family night audience
The link list
One page with every student's name and live URL. Nothing convinces faster than a working product built by a fifteen-year-old.
Before and after
A short survey in Session 1 and again at the showcase session, using the same questions. Report only students who answered both, and show the count alongside the percentage.
Firsts
Count what happened for the first time: first interview with a stranger, first published website, first public pitch. These land harder than averages.
Student words
Two or three unedited reflection quotes. Keep the grammar. It is more credible than polished copy.
Attendance and completion
Sessions attended and projects finished. Boring, and the first thing a funder asks for.
The reason the work gets finished.
The showcase is not a nice extra. It is the reason the work gets finished. Set the date in Session 1 and tell students who is coming.
- Set the date, time, and room; confirm it is on the school calendar
- Draft the invite list: families, admin, partners, funders, local press
- Tell students by name who is coming
- Send invites and a reminder
- Collect every project link into one page
- First full rehearsal — 90 seconds each, standing, no notes
- Tech check: every link opens on the presentation device
- Print certificates and the link handout
- Confirm food, chairs, and the projector
- Arrive 45 minutes early; test the projector with a student's actual site
- Doors open 15 minutes before; students greet their own guests
- Run the pitches back to back, no gaps
- Certificates by name, with one specific sentence about each student
- Open floor: guests visit students at their laptops
The 90-second pitch
The person
Name a real human you interviewed and what they told you.
The problem
One sentence, plus your strongest number.
What you built
Show the live product doing the one thing it does. Do not narrate the menu.
What you learned
Including what failed. This is the beat adults remember.
The club doesn't have to end.
The showcase is a milestone, not an ending. A club that stops after twelve sessions loses exactly the students who just discovered they can build things. Everything below is written so your second cycle is easier than your first, and so returning students never sit through Session 01 twice.
Cycle 2: same five steps, higher bar.
Run the twelve sessions again with a new problem — but raise the standard at every checkpoint. Students already know the moves, so the sessions move faster and the work gets deeper. In the platform this is simply a new project with a fresh set of sprints, so the first project stays published and intact in their portfolio.
Interview strangers and adults outside the building, not peers. Five interviews, not three.
Local data only. If the number is national, find the neighborhood version of it.
Cut the 2×2 down to two finalists and prototype both roughly before choosing.
Ship on time with a real second feature, and write the tools-and-trade-offs notes as they go.
Test with people who are not in the club at all, and run two revision loops.
Pitch to an outside audience with a real ask — a partner, a principal, a funder.
What does not change: the five steps, the checkpoints, the publish-everything rule, and the showcase. Familiar structure is what lets students spend their energy on the work instead of on the format.
Tracks for returning students
Deepen
Keep the same project and take it outside the building. Add the feature they cut in Session 09, run tests with people who have never seen it, and set a usage goal instead of a build goal.
Platform · reopen Sprints 4–6 on the existing project; new Prototype and Test tasks on the same board.
Widen
New mission category from the Challenge Brief, new problem, faster cycle. Second-time students routinely get from problem to published link in six or seven sessions.
Platform · new Challenge Brief entry and a fresh Sprint 1, so the finished project stays published.
Lead
Give them real facilitation work: run the open, teach the three interview rules, host interview practice, sit with a stuck first-cycle student. Being trusted to teach it is the thing that keeps them coming back.
Platform · pair them with newer students' boards; they coach the checkpoint, you keep the standard.
Portfolio & pathway
Turn the work into an application. Profile and skills written in plain language, every published link in one place, a résumé bullet per project, and the story rehearsed for an interview or an essay.
Platform · profile, skills, and published project pages become the portfolio they send out.
Session formats between cycles
Build lab
No teaching. Doors open, everyone works on their own project, you circulate and coach. The default filler session between cycles — and often the most productive session of the month.
Critique round
Three students present current work for five minutes each; the room gives one thing that works and one thing to fix. Rotate so everyone presents within a month.
Teardown
Pull up a real app or a public website and take it apart: who is this for, what is the core flow, what would you cut. Cheap to run, and it sharpens design language fast.
Interview clinic
Practice interviews on staff or visitors, recorded and reviewed. The single highest-leverage skill in F7 and the easiest one to let go stale.
Mission scouting
Walk the neighborhood or comb local news and log problems worth solving to the Challenge Brief. Builds a backlog so the next cycle starts fast.
Community demo night
A smaller, lower-stakes showcase for families or a partner organization. Run one between cycles to keep the audience — and the momentum — alive.
Running it all year
Two cycles, one year
Cycle 1 in the fall, a short break of build labs and critique rounds, Cycle 2 in the spring with a bigger showcase. The most common shape, and the easiest to staff.
Rolling admission
New students join at any session and start at Sprint 1 while the room works. The platform's per-student sprints make this painless — pair each newcomer with a returning student for their first two sessions.
Don't go dark after the showcase
Meet the very next session, even for 45 minutes. Momentum lost after a showcase is the number one reason clubs quietly end.
Recruit from the audience
Every showcase is a recruiting event. Have a sign-up sheet and tell guests the next cycle's first session date out loud.
Grow leaders, not just members
Name two returning students as facilitators each cycle. It doubles your coaching capacity and gives them something real to put on an application.
Keep the evidence current
Run the same survey at the start and end of each cycle, and keep the link list updated. It is what renews approval and funding without a scramble.
- Students arrive already knowing what they are working on.
- Someone asks to interview a person you did not suggest.
- Students fix each other's bugs before asking you.
- A student shows the project to someone outside the club unprompted.
- Returning students volunteer to run part of a session.
- Boards have not moved in two sessions — start a new cycle or switch tracks.
- The room is waiting for instructions — you have drifted into teaching; go back to build labs.
- Attendance drops right after a showcase — you went dark too long.
- Everyone's project looks the same — the problems came from you, not from interviews.
Everything else you need.
Room & materials
- Sticky notes (two colors) and markers
- Wall or window space for clustering
- Projector or large screen
- Power strips — assume every laptop is at 8%
- Device per student with a modern browser
- Snacks. Non-negotiable for an after-school block.
Session 01 setup
- Student accounts created on the platform
- Media and publishing consent collected from families
- Recurring block confirmed for all twelve sessions, with room to keep going after
- Showcase date set and shared
- Backup interviewee list built from staff in the building
- AI rule posted on the wall
Every session
- Open with stakes, not logistics
- Coach in the work block — hands off keyboards
- Public checkpoint at the halfway mark
- Close with spoken commitments
- Log attendance and one note per student
Introducing the club (Session 1)
Your student has joined F7, an after-school design and technology club. Over twelve sessions they will choose a problem in our community, interview real people about it, and build and publish a working website or tool that helps. We finish on [DATE] with a showcase where every student presents what they built — you are invited, and your student will be presenting to you. No prior tech experience is needed, and everything students build stays theirs.
For a student to send (Session 2)
Hi [NAME], I'm in the F7 club at [SCHOOL] and I'm researching [PROBLEM]. Could I ask you about six questions for twenty minutes? I'm not selling anything — I just want to understand your experience so what I build is actually useful. I'm free [TIMES].
For partners and administrators (2–3 sessions before the showcase)
You're invited to the F7 Showcase on [DATE] at [TIME], [LOCATION]. [N] students will present products they designed and published themselves — each one built around a problem they identified in our community and researched through real interviews. Presentations run about [N] minutes total, followed by an open floor to talk with students about their work.
Publishing student work
Student projects are published to the public web so they can be shared with family, schools, and future employers. Projects display the student's first name only unless a family requests otherwise. Photos and video from sessions may be used by [ORGANIZATION] and F7 Missions to describe the program. Families may opt out of photos, of full-name display, or of public publishing at any time by contacting [CONTACT].
Safety, consent, and publishing
- Collect media and publishing consent before the first session, and honor opt-outs without making it a conversation in front of the room.
- Default to first names only on published projects.
- Interviews with adults outside the building happen in public spaces or with a staff member present.
- Review every project before it goes public for personal information — addresses, phone numbers, school schedules.
- Anything a student collects from users during testing is deleted at the end of the program.
Get the printable playbook
The full playbook is free to read on this page. Tell us who you are and we'll hand you the print-ready PDF — plus we'll know to check in if you decide to run a club.