This year, Leysin American School became the first high school in the world to offer Pro 340, a professional design studio created in partnership with the Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD) and adapted from the university’s acclaimed SCADpro model. Once an experience reserved for university-level design students, this program is now part of the LAS curriculum, giving our students real-world, industry-savvy perspectives usually accessed only in graduate study or on professional design teams.
SCADpro has a reputation for pairing students with real companies to solve real problems, and bringing that model down to the high school level is no small undertaking. It reflects Leysin American School’s broader commitment to giving students hands-on, professional-grade experiences well before they set foot on a university campus.
Diving In From Day One
Our Pro 340 students got to work from their very first week of the course. Rather than starting with theory or lectures, they were handed a challenge and told to start thinking like designers.
Their first project began with something very relatable for a boarding school student: identifying the problems roommates face when sharing a space. Anyone who has lived with a roommate, whether in a school dorm, a college apartment, or a family home, knows the friction points well: shared bathrooms, mismatched schedules, clashing habits, and competition for storage.
Working in teams, students are now taking those everyday frustrations and turning them into design opportunities. They are researching, brainstorming, prototyping, and refining products that could genuinely solve the problems roommates encounter, all using the same design-thinking process that professional studios rely on: empathize, define, ideate, prototype, and test.
From Design Studio to Market
What makes Pro 340 especially exciting is that the project does not end when the design work is finished. Once students have developed and refined their products, those ideas will be passed along to students in our Pre-MBA course, who will pick up where the designers left off.
The Pre-MBA students will:
Explore pricing strategies for the products
Analyze potential markets and target customers
Develop full business plans around each concept
In other words, one group of students designs the solution, and another group figures out how to bring it to market, a handoff that mirrors exactly how ideas move in the real world.
Experiencing the Full Arc of Innovation
This cross-course collaboration is a cornerstone of our Changemakers program at Leysin American School. At LAS, we want students to experience the full arc of innovation: from identifying a real problem, to designing a thoughtful solution, to building a viable business around it. By linking Pro 340 with the Pre-MBA course, students see firsthand that a great idea is only the beginning; it takes research, iteration, pricing strategy, and a solid business plan to turn that idea into something real.
This kind of interdisciplinary learning is what sets the Changemakers program apart. It teaches students about innovation and puts them inside the process, while working alongside their peers across different skill sets, just as professional teams in the real world do.
Looking Ahead
We are very proud to be the first high school in the world to bring the SCADpro model to our students through Pro 340. This bold step fits perfectly with our mission to prepare students for the world by providing meaningful, impactful learning opportunities beyond the classroom.
As our first group of Pro 340 students continues developing their roommate-focused product designs, and our Pre-MBA students work to bring those products to market, we can’t wait to see where their creativity, problem-solving, and entrepreneurial thinking take them!
