Words to Live By: Mrs. Sabados Prepares Students for Gates Competition

Director of Gates Jenny Sabados arrived at Cardigan last August. She was new to New Hampshire, new to the boarding school lifestyle, and new to the all-boys education model. She had never coached before, never lived in a dorm, and knew nothing about Cardigan’s annual traditions. 

“All fall I felt like I was living at least half a second behind everyone else,” she remembers. “I kept wondering, ‘Can I do this?’”

What Mrs. Sabados did have, however, was a passion for experiential learning. She came to Cardigan from Bay Farm Montessori Academy in Duxbury, Massachusetts, where she was the creator and director of The Shop, a maker lab specifically designed for middle school students. Previously, Mrs. Sabados had also worked as the director of community and external relations at the Cloud Foundation Idea Translation Lab where she helped to develop the Boston 100K ArtScience Prize, an innovation competition established in 2009 for Boston public high school students, modeled after the MIT 100K Business Plan Competition. 

“Project-based, student-led learning prepares students for the modern world, a world in which they are no longer climbing a ladder, but rather navigating a maze of opportunity,” she says. “We can not confidently identify the careers for which they will apply, but the Gates program at Cardigan teaches them to be inquisitive, flexible, independent, life-long learners with a sensitivity to possibility and global thinking.”

“Project-based, student-led learning prepares students for the modern world, a world in which they are no longer climbing a ladder, but rather navigating a maze of opportunity.”

Mrs. Sabados

So, like any good teacher––who models for her students what she expects from them––Mrs. Sabados jumped into the Cardigan community with both feet and started figuring it out. Eight months later, there are still aspects of Cardigan that she has yet to experience, but she no longer wonders if she made the right decision. She and her family have found a home at Cardigan. “I’ve fallen in love with coaching, with advising, with dorm living,” she says. “The Administrative Team has been incredibly supportive, and it feels like Chris and Annie and I have been working together forever.” Chris and Annie, of course, are her colleagues in the Gates program––Lead Instructors Chris Kondi and Annie Clark.

Her enthusiasm for Cardigan is clear, especially in the Gates lab, where she is all-in––helping students to clarify the developments of their inventions, collaborating with her colleagues to learn new makerspace tools, and preparing for her first Charles C. Gates Invention and Innovation Competition. What’s her vision? A few mantras seem to be guiding her forward.

Just open the box.

Whether starting a new job or inventing a new widget, there are countless unknowns and it is easy to get stymied by unanswered questions and unfamiliar processes. In both situations Mrs. Sabados relies on the same mantra: “Just open the box.” Sometimes the best way to make forward progress is just to take one step––open a box, set one meeting, connect two wires. For Mrs. Sabados, literally opening a box has led to the beginnings of a robotics program.

“I knew coming in that Cardigan owned several VEX IQ kits, educational robotics products, but the training to use them was minimal,” she explains. “Sixth grade teacher Amy Kreuzburg P’14,’17 and I decided to just figure it out. We started a Thursday Club for robotics, enlisted the help of a student who has some familiarity with VEX products, and started at the beginning. Twelve boys joined us. It’s been a really positive experience and has resulted in two students utilizing VEX for their Gates inventions.”

There’s still much to do––become proficient with the technology, find funding to attend competitions, grow the number of students in the club––but the box is open.

If you don’t have enough hands, find others to help you.

With over 50 unique inventions in development by over 70 students, the Gates Lab is a busy place, and Mrs. Sabados relies heavily upon individuals all over campus, and encourages her students to do the same. Need a specific sized aluminum rod for a customizable telescope? Perhaps Director of Facilities Joe Roberts can help. Want to develop a visual campaign for eliminating food waste in school cafeterias? Perhaps Director of Dining Services Joe Hines can provide some input. 

Mrs. Sabados also draws on the expertise of people beyond campus. One project she is working on with the eighth grade is the redesign of a hydroponic system that has been in development for several years. “The goal is to create a working system taking into consideration food-grade materials, global food system issues, and the needs of the user/community,” says Mrs. Sabados. “I personally knew very little about hydroponics going in, so I invited a local businessman to share his expertise and advise us through the redesign process.” Upgrades to the system have included non-toxic water conduits, black boxes to prevent the growth of mold and mildew, and a charcoal filter that removes chlorine and chloramine from the water. While the system still needs additional tweaks and adjustments, the eighth graders have successfully germinated several strawberry plants!

Mrs. Sabados has also engaged the help of Ian Grant, the former director of the Peter T. Paul Entrepreneurship Center at the University of New Hampshire and a current special advisor to the African Wildlife Foundation. Mr. Grant met online with the eighth-grade Gates classes, discussing with them the invention process and emphasizing to them the importance of consumer discovery in product development and refinement. More recently the same students, along with a few seventh graders, visited Boston Dynamics, where they spent the day learning about the company’s ongoing development of robots to solve automation challenges.

“I love the ‘wow’ factor of taking students off campus and exposing them to new technology,” says Mrs. Sabados. “Our trip to Boston Dynamics directly influenced at least three student projects. I wish I could have taken all my students.” She is planning additional field trips for May once the Gates Competition is over.

Consider the global perspective.

As Mrs. Sabados began preparing students for the Gates Competition back in November, she asked students to create a mind map of their own interests, listing their passions and exploring areas of their lives about which they are curious. “A lot of them initially and predictably focused on sports,” says Mrs. Sabados, “but I encouraged them to think more broadly and spent a lot of time focusing on empathy. How might a product help someone? How is it going to affect their life and the everyday problems they might encounter? For each solution to a problem they created, I had them map out who it will impact––and not just the primary customers but secondary and tertiary customers as well.”

The Gates students have embraced this directive. “These young men are attacking big problems like food waste, a lack of clean drinking water in certain areas of the world, city development under rising sea levels, and the day-to-day needs of the vision impaired,” says Mrs. Sabados. “These are not easy endeavors, and they most likely won’t be solved by the competition in April. But this ‘thinking outside of themselves’ is some of the most important work they will do in Gates and beyond their time at Cardigan. These boys are approaching these challenges with confidence and resilience, knowing they will fail on many levels, but they keep getting back up and moving forward. That is what Gates is all about, learning that failure is a necessary step toward success.”

In another month, Mrs. Sabados, Mr. Kondi, and Ms. Clark, along with many Gates coaches, will be working with the Gates students on the final preparations for the competition, one that Mrs. Sabados guarantees will be exceptional: “I’m looking forward to seeing the boys present their projects to a live audience. They have so much passion and charisma! I know their projects and every time I hear them present, I’m ready to get out my wallet!”

Stay tuned. Introductory videos of all student projects will be shared soon.