Mini Kit Resource
A half-day classroom-ready activity making real-world problem solving accessible to all students, year-round.
Bringing Problem Solving into Every Classroom
The Mini Kit is a classroom activity designed for Grades 6 and up, to help students learn the skills and mindsets of real-world problem solving. The experience has been tested in classrooms and refined through student use and feedback in Spring 2026.
Through a guided process based in Integrative Thinking, students reflect on their own experiences, utilize facts, step into different perspectives, identify benefits, and build recommendations. Along the way, they practice collaboration, perspective-taking, and real-world problem solving.
The Mini Kit is:
Easy to facilitate - clear student instructions and ready-to-use materials
Flexible - adaptable across grades 6 and up and subject areas
Student-centered - driven by student voice and lived experience
A Step-by-Step Journey Through
Real-World Problem Solving
The Mini Kit is a grab-and-go resource that guides students through a structured series of steps to explore, reflect, and take action. Using physical cards with instructions, students are invited to think more deeply and critically about their real-world problem. At the end of most steps, groups are asked a question to synthesize their thinking, and can only move onto the next step after sharing their thinking with the teacher.
The steps on the Real-World Problem Solving Journey Include:
Ignite Your Curiosity - Students share stories of their own lived experience and learn facts about their problem.
Launch the Challenge - Students are introduced to their real-world problem.
Meet Your Character - Each group member chooses one character from a set of cards to play for the rest of the experience. Characters represent different perspectives of the people impacted.
Choose What Matters - Students identify the most relevant benefits, ideas, values or outcomes from opposing models, using a set of cards, for their characters.
Ask Why. Then Ask Again - Students dig deeper into their ideas by synthesizing their benefits into big ideas.
Create Together - Students collaborate to create a recommendation to their problem.
Share Your Creation - Students share their ideas with the rest of the class and explain their thinking.
Capture Your Thinking - Students reflect on what they learned and capture how their ideas and understanding evolved.
Clean Up! - Students take time to reset their space and organize activity materials.
About the Well-Being Mini Kit Resource
This half-day experience introduces students to what it means to solve real-world problems by navigating the creative tension between ideas. Students are challenged to imagine ways to integrate well-being into their classroom, exploring what it means to feel and be well, both individually and as a community. Using research, including the PERMA-V framework, and grounded in critical thinking, the Mini Kit helps students reflect on their own experiences and assumptions about well-being, and revisit their thinking after engaging with new perspectives and ideas. As they engage with different perspectives, they are encouraged to compare ideas and consider the implications of different approaches to well-being. Students build toward recommending thoughtful ideas, which they present to the class.
Why a Mini Kit
Builds real-world problem solving skills
Students engage in inquiry, perspective-taking, and recommendation-shaping, around a real challenge.
Easy to implement and flexible
Ready-to-use materials that fit into existing classroom time and across subject areas, so you can use mini kits year-round.
Centers student voice
Gives students a meaningful way to share their experiences and shape their learning environment.
Strengthens well-being and belonging
Creates space for conversations that help students feel seen, heard, and connected.
Turns thinking into action
Supports students in moving from ideas to recommendations that can influence real change in their classroom or school.
Interested in creating your own?
Want to engage young people on the issues that matter most? Let’s build a custom mini kit together.