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It’s hard to believe that the ACE season is already halfway over, but last week was the midterm review. The review session is meant to mimic a 50 percent project review, where the students (“the consultants”) present their drawings to the other teams (“the clients”) and receive questions and input on what they’ve put together to date.

The four ACE teams that meet on Tuesdays gathered at a large conference room at the office of David Evans and Associates. Each team divided into four groups to create new mixed groups of students and mentors.

The mixed groups rotated around the conference room, spending 10 minutes at each team’s pinned-up drawings. At their project’s station, the students of that team spent 10 minutes presenting their design to the other members of the mixed group.

My own team, Team 2, has been developing drawings for the arts addition for a high school in southeast Portland. The students from Team 2 discussed key design elements, like a sky bridge that connects the addition to the main school building, and how this feature influenced other design decisions, like the floor plan of the rest of the addition. By opening their design to the scrutiny of a peer review, and also by providing review for others, the students were forced to critically think about their project.

Once each mixed group had been around to each project station, the students and mentors met with their usual team members to talk about what they learned or had seen during the review. Our role as mentors will now be to encourage the students to take what they learned from the midterm review and use it as an opportunity to improve their project for the final presentation in May.