YES! KIDS CAN

Yes! Kids Can placed creative confidence at the centre of learning. Through community-based design thinking, Primary 5 and 6 students observed neighbourhood needs, represented different community groups, worked with cross-disciplinary mentors, and built 1:1 prototypes that brought their ideas into public view.

Organised by PMQ and designed and run by AaaM Architects, Yes! Kids Can was a 20-hour school outreach programme held from May to July 2019. The programme began with a clear educational aim: to help children believe that creativity is something they can practise through real situations.
Creative confidence was introduced through action. Students observed, asked questions, tested ideas, made adjustments and shared their work. They learned that a design idea does not need to arrive perfectly formed. It can begin with a small concern, a street corner, a neighbour’s habit, or a problem noticed on the way to school.

The programme invited students to step outside the classroom and use their school neighbourhoods as learning sites. Streets, parks, crossings, shops, resting places and public corners became places for observation and discussion.
Through role-play and “community clan” exercises, students represented different people who live, work or pass through the neighbourhood. They mapped where these people might appear, identified their needs, and prepared interview questions before entering the community with their mentors. The process helped children move from personal preference to a wider awareness of how different people use the same place.

Four schools from four different neighbourhoods joined the programme, each bringing a distinct local context. In Causeway Bay, students explored “Chicken Talks to Duck,” reflecting on how different groups share a busy district while often speaking past one another. In Tin Shui Wai, “Tin Shui Maze” grew from children’s reading of a dense residential landscape where repeated routes and similar towers can feel disorienting.
In Fo Tan, “Ten Up Ten Down” responded to the everyday movement between hillside, industrial areas and school routes. In To Kwa Wan and Kowloon City, students looked at urban renewal, old neighbourhoods, construction sites and questions of livability. These themes gave students concrete entry points into Hong Kong’s diversity: movement, identity, communication, redevelopment, rest and everyday care.

AaaM guided students through the design thinking process: empathise, define, ideate, prototype and test. Findings from neighbourhood walks, interviews and mapping exercises were translated into mind maps, sketches, models and group proposals.
Students then developed real-scale 1:1 prototypes using accessible and recycled materials. The works were playable, engageable or functional installation pieces. At full scale, ideas had to deal with the body, structure, balance, material and use. A bamboo pavilion, a carbon-learning device, a traffic game, a floating pyramid or a gathering structure became more than a classroom exercise; each prototype tested how children’s observations could be turned into something others could enter, touch, play with or discuss.

AaaM acted as programme designer, lead mentor and teaching team coordinator, bringing together mentors from architecture, art, product design, making, STEM-related fields and education. The programme worked like a small design studio, with students moving between observation, drawing, making, testing and presentation.
The final works were exhibited at PMQ from 17 to 25 August 2019. Students introduced their prototypes directly to visitors, explaining who they had observed, what problem they chose, how their work functioned and what kind of neighbourhood moment they hoped to create. The public exhibition gave children a platform to speak for their ideas and experience how design can enter a wider community conversation.