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My students spent approximately one month per topic, learning basic subject matter as they went. Regardless of the topic, I made Government and Civics intrinsic to how I taught my students to make connections between their model of a City of the Future and the classroom. To teach about governance and civic responsibility, I had turned the City and the classroom into five corresponding Council Districts and had the students in each District elect representatives. I then rearranged the classroom furniture, grouping tables together to represent each District in the revised City. My students role-played leadership positions in their Council Districts to learn about vested interests. They studied the organization of their community, of Los Angeles, and of the nation. They read the Bill of Rights and parts of the Constitution and wrote about the rights they wanted for their City and their classroom. They began learning the meaning of consequences and to know that laws are enacted for a reason, not simply that laws are enacted.

Having my students build and govern their City turned out to be indispensable for my research about Non-Specific Transfer of Learning. During the months-long process of revising their Starter City of the Future through experiences in critical and creative thinking, students role-played landowners, designers, government officials, and citizens—roles that corresponded to the governance of the classroom.

The students wrote detailed job descriptions and learned to debate such issues as how high the buildings should be in their City of the Future, how the desks should be organized in the classroom, and who got to decide and why. Ultimately, they voted unanimously to have their City remain in the center of the classroom with their desks around it so that they could easily compare their designs to facts they learned about each topic.

My yearlong curriculum became progressively more complex as I presented the sequenced, month-long activities that I would soon call Design Challenges. Based on what I came to call BIG TOPICS, these Design Challenges led to my teaching required subjects as Guided Lessons (small topics). Having students read, compute, and collect information about what others had done to solve a problem, taught them to make comparisons to their own solutions as they revised their initial designs. My research about the application of Non-Specific Transfer of Learning within the context of a city had come alive.

Experiencing higher-level Non-Specific Transfer of Learning, my students easily absorbed information and applied it to new situations. They were exactly where I wanted them to be. They became detectives, uncovering ways that changes in housing occur because of natural conditions—earthquakes, weather changes—or because of poverty, human interventions, and inventions. They freely projected themselves into the future, imagining change from their own perspectives. It was obvious that my students had gained a sense of power over their learning. They loved that there were so many ways to be “right” and I did, too. As their City of the Future came to life, we all became a family of learners.

Over the months, my students made significant gains in their academic skills. This propelled me to go on to explore ways to deepen the understanding and practice of Non-Specific Transfer of Learning through my gradually evolving 6½ Steps of Backwards Thinking™, the heart of my Design-Based Learning methodology.

I discovered that what I called things mattered. To avoid starting at the lowest level on Bloom's Taxonomy with what is known, I asked for Never-Before-Seen everything. They built Never-Before-Seen Creatures to learn about the characteristics of animals, Never-Before-Seen Shelters to learn about protection, Never-Before-Seen Ways to Move People and Goods around the City—and later, a Never-Before-Seen Way to Transmit Disease to study a viral vector.

For each experience, I gave the students a checklist of specific criteria that I derived from subject requirements. These defined the conditions they needed to meet to achieve their designs. Real designers always have constraints—from the client, from government regulations, or from the description of the design problem itself. Artists and scientists work within a set of constraints, too. When I gave my students my Criteria List, I was the client.

I taught them to describe their design solutions orally in different settings (one-on-one, in small groups, and to the entire class), to learn to own what they had made. My students grew so attached to their creations that they wanted to read, research, and write about how what they made compared to real-life solutions—and they frequently said that their solutions were better!

None of these student-made designs required elaborate materials or inordinate classroom time. The initial Never-Before-Seen designs were “instant” physical representations of students' creative thinking, built in only 30 to 45 minutes. The result was as simple as a piece paper turned into a three-dimensional artifact. Having it, being able to describe the thought process that got them there, then refining their initial creations with new vocabulary associated with the design dilemma, led my students to learn required information and remember it.

While my students were applying creative thinking to the design of physical artifacts for their City, Ruth's 3rd and 4th graders expressed their creativity in filmmaking: their documentary-style film, The History of Oakwood, about the real Oakwood community, won a prize at a children's film festival.

In my longitudinal study 10 years later, when I made a film (Classroom City) surveying students from my 1969–1970 class, a nonreader had become the editor of the student paper at the University of California at Santa Cruz, a once-average student was an attorney, a shy girl (who was removed from her abusive home and placed in foster care while in the class) became a published author and based many of her stories around that time period.

My research from my class in Venice, and my subsequent experience in training K–12 teachers in cross-curricular “City Building” gave me a comprehensive template for teaching the theoretical underpinnings of what would become the Doreen Nelson Method of Design-Based Learning with 6½ Steps of Backwards Thinking™.

I had been searching for a limitless context. The City was it.