An SF State sponsored shop class of sorts is giving high school students in the embattled Bayview neighborhood the chance to build something with more than just power tools.

Going beyond simple woodworking, the Industrial Design Outreach program, held at Thurgood Marshall High School, takes it a step further by teaching state-of-the-art design software and creative concepts.

Put it this way: it’s not your parents’ blue-collar shop class.

“We do not teach shop,” said program leader and Design and Industry Professor Martin Linder. “Yes, we train usage of tools, but that is just the venue of this class. The focus is creative thinking.”

And according to Tera Freedman, the Computer Art teacher who leads the class, the students are truly enjoying that thinking process.

“This has been the most amazing program,” said Freedman, who has worked with Linder on different projects for three years. “This is not your basic wood shop class. This is product design, and it’s a concept a lot of kids hadn’t been taught yet.”

When Linder launched the grant-funded IDO in 2003 as a way to bring the field of industrial design to high school students, he embarked on a series of projects around San Francisco. With a team of student mentors from SF State, the projects included CD jacket and T-shirts design.

Earlier projects were often fraught with challenges such as lack of a dedicated teacher and space in which to teach the class.

“We have great faculty support at Thurgood and we have our own room,” said Linder. “That alone has made this project particularly successful.”

Now, five years since its inception, IDO has hit its stride with the community bench project, in which the students design and make panels to be mounted on a large bench.

The project began with students sketching designs depicting their idea of community. Next, they used design software to plan prototypes of their panels. Freedman said the most important thing students got out of the project was understanding the “concept of process.”

“It’s a really hard idea to teach, but all the kids got it,” she said.

Each of the 24 panels will be mounted to the back of a bench to be placed in the city on April 3 during a ribbon cutting ceremony.

“It really lifted the kids up in so many ways,” said Freedman. “They really discovered things within themselves. A lot of them had never worked with their hands. They’re usually consumers, and now they’re actually making something.”

At Thurgood Marshall, the students have access to all the necessary power tools and computer software, thanks to a $15,000 grant. The class has met 5 days a week for 20 weeks and will conclude at the end of the semester.

For a public school system suffering with low test scores, overcrowding and lack of qualified teachers, IDO is giving students in an inner city high school a rare opportunity.

Most of Thurgood Marshall’s 642 students come from low-income families, and 58 percent qualify for free or reduced-price lunches. Also, more than 94 percent are minorities, and 27 percent are learning English as a second language.

“They don’t get special treatment and don’t understand how to utilize opportunity because they’ve never had it,” Freedman said. “They don’t know how to grab something and take it, because it just never happens to them.”

SF State student mentor Ryan Pugh, a 28-year old DAI major, said he joined the program because of his own educational history. Growing up in Arizona, he said industrial design and shop classes were required, but he noticed an absence of such courses in middle and high schools today.

“In the past 10 years, I’ve watched classes like this get eliminated because of budget cuts,” he said. “So when I heard about IDO, I was hooked. I wanted to bring that experience back to these kids.”

Linder said the fundamental core of the program is the way the project provides “relevant models of learning that are experiential. We have the application of geometry, creative problem solving and collaborative learning.”

Linder also said the program is needed in public schools today, especially since California has suffered repeated slashes to education.

“I’m very committed to the public realm,” he said. “I believe that we as a society have a commitment to public education and our public workforces. By overlooking that, we are seeing the ramifications in our culture.”

Linder said the interdisciplinary approach of the class offers ways for students to think and apply what they have learned, which he said is a far cry from traditional shop classes and gives students an edge when they look for jobs in the “real world.”

Ultimately, Linder said the community bench project was a tangible lesson that can be applied to many jobs the students will eventually get.

“We are seeing the rise of creative thinking,” he said. “And with IDO, we are essentially on a crusade.”

Pugh also highlighted the differences between IDO projects and the shop classes of years past.

“When I grew up, the class was all about ‘here’s a piece of sheet metal, here are the tools, here’s how you build it,’” he said. “Now, with this program, we’re saying ‘here’s the curriculum, here are the materials, what are you going to do with it?’”

Pugh, who has been with IDO since 2006, said that of all the projects he has participated in, the community bench project at Thurgood Marshall has by far been the most successful.

“We had to start from the ground up,” said Pugh. “Some of the kids didn’t even understand the concept of community. But once we got started, there wasn’t a single kid who wasn’t engaged in the project.”

Freedman said students at Thurgood Marshall have many academic difficulties, making it a challenge to ensure success.

“We have some students that are basically dropping out, some 18-year-olds that don’t even have full ninth grade credit, but they come to this class every day.”

Like Freedman, Pugh and Linder said that the class was a hit with all of the students.

“We had this kid who was notorious for missing nearly every class, every day, he said. “But not this class.”

Linder said the project engaged even those hardest to reach.

“Even the kids that were sitting in the back, hoods over their heads, couldn’t help but get into it,” he said. “Over the course of the semester, we saw those hoods slowly coming down.”