Filed Under ‘workshop’

December 30, 2011

Are you a better designer than a 5th Grader?

I was invited to join the group as a classroom co-designer and facilitator by Hsing Wei, experience designer and games and education expert. The idea was to conduct two co-design sessions – one with fifth graders in Queens and one with high school students in the Lower East Side – where the output would be material for a panel discussion at the Mobility Shifts conference hosted by Parsons. Our topic was “NYC Students Imagine the 2050 Classroom” and it was our goal to find out from students themselves what the future of the classroom might be.

We had both worked with high school students before and were sure we could plan a successful session for them. However, neither of us had worked with children under the age of 14. What the heck would we do with fifth graders to keep them entertained and engaged?

Our first instinct was to plan the high school session and then reduce its complexity for the fifth graders. We thought it might be helpful for the younger students to have a few more answers than what we would normally give to the more mature students. We planned the arc of the session to provide a mix of inquiry exercises, sketching sessions and reflection, all with the goal of getting the students to design an ideal learning experience for the year 2050.

Wing It!

We didn’t know what to expect when we arrived in Forest Hills. At first it was overwhelming to walk through the halls of a grade school; none of the students was taller than my waist! Finally we arrived in our classroom and met the teacher with whom we’d had a few preparatory phone calls. Soon the students would arrive.

At the last minute, Hsing and I decided to change a few of the activities we had planned. After talking with their teacher, we realized the fifth graders would be far more creative than we had imagined. We decided to throw out many of the examples we had planned to show, and focus instead on asking the right questions for facilitation.

When the students arrived we were delighted to find them alert and excited for our session. We got them warmed up by sharing about ourselves. We talked for a moment about our work as user experience designers, and then asked them to share their names and their favorite books.

What is the problem with learning?

We shared our day’s mission with the students: the idea that we could start to re-imagine the classroom using design. First we needed to discover the problem with the current learning environment. We conducted a problem-finding exercise, asking them to call out all the places where they learn. We heard a broad range of ideas, proving our hypothesis that learning happens in many places outside the classroom.

We then asked students to draw a storyboard to tell the story of something they’d learned recently. They had a hard time coming up with ideas for learning that happened outside of school, but with a little nudging their ideas came flowing out.

One student told about learning how to organize his Legos. Another told of an experiment she conducted to learn how long a hot liquid stays warm in a thermos.

Focus on Tools as a Tangible Representation of Learning

When designers talk about redesigning education there’s all kinds of interesting fodder: communication, curriculum, collaboration, environment, context, exploration, and opportunities for delight. We knew it would be difficult for any level student to understand these abstract concepts unless they’ve had a chance to view the education system as an outsider.

We decided to indirectly get to these abstract concepts using concrete, tangible objects that the students could visualize and relate to. We focused on the desk, the blackboard and the notebook in our fifth grade class, splitting them into three groups according to their interests. Again, we asked them to discover the problem first, listing all the qualities – good and bad – of their assigned tool.

Sketch, Re-Sketch, Sketch Again

After the students had discovered what they already knew about learning and tools we asked them to redesign their object.

How can you make it better?
What do you wish it could do differently?
How can you use what you know about learning outside the classroom to make this in-class object more useful?

The students presented their first round of sketches and received critique from their co-designers. Each student processed the critique with a sharp mind for understanding change. Their wheels were turning the whole time, trying to understand how they might make their idea better.

We then asked them to redesign again. Many groups took what they had already developed and created a new concept that was even better than their first iteration. Some of the students had a hard time understanding why they had to re-sketch the whole idea. “Why can’t we just erase some parts and draw new ones?” With a little nudging they started to re-sketch their ideas and quickly realized that coming up with an entirely new drawing forced them to think of all kinds of new ideas.

Students’ Perspectives Don’t Align with Adults’ Ideas

We noticed the students stumbling over how to include technology into their ideas. When we suggested using new technology, many students countered, “Well, we can’t use a phone in school so we didn’t think there should be any technology in the new tool.” One group suggested including a printed dictionary in their desk that could be replaced every couple years when updates needed to be made. They theorized that this would be a cheaper option than including a tablet or smart phone, which would be far more expensive to replace if the screen broke.

Ultimately, all their ideas focused on human interaction as the new mode of learning. They were far less interested in including technology than they were at maximizing the time they spend with their peers and teachers each day. This outlook is vastly different from the top-down “use tech to save education” approach taken by many school authorities at the moment.

Telling Stories

At the end of our session, we asked the students to create a storyboard to communicate their new product ideas in the form of a narrative. It was a great way for them to individually synthesize all the new ideas they had just dreamed up, and the linear format converted their abstract thinking into concrete terms.

Finishing on a High Note

At the end of the day we were thrilled to see all that the students had accomplished. We left the school with an armful of well-thought-out sketches and a hard drive full of video of the students enthusiastically explaining their ideas. The students left with a better understanding of the design process and ideas they were proud to share.

When we met them again for our panel session in October they were still buzzing with excitement about some of their ideas. For us, and for the panel creators, we were excited to show yet another piece of evidence that engaging kids in hands-on, self-directed learning enables them to take ownership of their ideas. They stay engaged, learn better, and get excited to share their work with anyone who’s interested in listening.

Going to the Woods

The students were selected for participation from the Chicago Architecture Foundation’s annual Newhouse Architecture Competition. Public Workshop is coordinating the whole week in part as a revival of Frank Lloyd Wright’s past Taliesin Fellowship. We’ll be spending our time designing and building a structure in the beautiful Wisconsin countryside.

I am thrilled to be one of the first Teaching Fellows for the program! I’m eager to meet my cohort, Daniel Splaingard, and to spend the week working alongside some amazing students. I’m particularly interested in meeting Joseph and Edwin, two of the minds behind wedesignawesomethings.

There’s a full write up on Alex’s site. I haven’t told him yet that I (sort of) hate nature. I’m going to man up and enjoy the fun and sunshine, despite the bugs and creepies that come along with being in the wilderness!!

Tags: Community, design, discovery, education, teaching, workshop
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June 16, 2011

Learning the Value of Debate

Right now I’m working with a client to help them define content and user experience design for a medium sized educational website. During the past few weeks we’ve had some lively stakeholder interviews and group discussion around the different types of content for the site. I thought I had a pretty good idea of how all the pieces were related.

When I sat down to lay out the wireframes I realized that there were a lot of unanswered questions. The core page’s content is so subject matter-specific that I was having a hard time answering the questions myself, regardless of how much discovery and requirements gathering I had done.

To solve the problem I introduced a variation of a card sorting activity at our meeting. On index cards I wrote down every type of content that might possibly appear on the page. I had the team work together to arrange the cards in groups in order of the content’s priority on the page. I asked them to complete the first five minutes of the activity without speaking to one another; I wanted them to share their gut instincts rather than making decisions based on a friendly discussion.

Four minutes into it they were ready to talk! During the process of arranging the cards they discovered a lot of questions they didn’t have before. We were able to have a healthy debate about the tangible decisions they had each made, and since there was a physical artifact on the table it made the conversation instantly more grounded. The entire process worked really well to clear up ambiguity in the terms we had been discussing abstractly for weeks. Although there were some heated moments (some of the team members felt very strongly about their intuition!) everyone was able to reach a consensus at the end.

At a high level, the outcomes of the exercise were:

Clearly defined content modules
A new plan for what type of content needs to be created
A hierarchy for the page that everyone agrees on

The whole activity only took about an hour, and it saved me a lot of time sketching and discovering the information they already know.

Tags: consulting, discovery, workshop
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March 26, 2011

Expanding Solutions for the Digital Classroom

On Friday my classmates Clint and Derek and I took the morning train to New Haven, CT to join the Yale Education Leadership Conference. We joined a panel session about the Digital Classroom hosted by Larry Berger, CEO of Wireless Generation.

Larry invited us to work with his team of designers to lead a workshop with the group of administrators, management students, and education innovators at the conference. We stayed for the day to iterate on the solutions that came out of the workshop session.

The Brief

After watching a short panel presentation from four leaders in classroom software development, each designer led a workshop with a group of 4-7 participants.

Each group addressed a common problem:

It may be too time consuming for many teachers to keep track of all of this student data, to locate patterns in the data, and to understand how to prioritize certain information about their students in order to design lessons and small-group activities.

And worked on a single task:

With your group, design an interface that would allow a teacher to visualize data collected regarding students’ progress toward the common core math standard below. Ideally, this interface would allow the teacher to see student mastery of specific sub-skills in order to create differentiated small-group lessons.

The Workshop Experience

All of the designers agreed beforehand on a common framework for the workshop.

Lead a discussion about the problem space to establish a common language among participants. Since the groups would be assembled of a variety of people with different backgrounds and ideas, this step is important to beginning a productive conversation.
Define a unique problem statement to solve during the session. What does our group care about? Choosing a specific angle helps all group members be more invested in the session.
Discuss what we already know about the problem. The 45 minutes allotted for the workshop isn’t enough time to do research. A quick and dirty research method is to leverage the knowledge of each group member to define the problems and opportunities in the space.
Rapid sketching and solution generation. The more ideas we can produce, the more likely we are to come up with a great solution.

In my group we began with a healthy discussion about the problem of real-time data collection and visualization, which I captured on Post-It notes for everyone to refer to as the conversation progressed.

We reached a hurdle in the middle. Everyone was content to politely discuss existing solutions, but there was very little movement toward ideas for new solutions.

The tone changed when I reframed the conversation with a new question that directed the group’s thoughts back to our users. “Think of a teacher in a classroom with 25 students. What is the most important piece of data the teacher needs to see?” Suddenly one woman announced she had an idea. She began describing her idea to the table. I handed a marker to her and asked if she would be able to sketch the concept she had just described. She gladly accepted the challenge and started drawing on the communal poster paper in the middle of the table.

Once the first person started sketching it broke the barrier between group observation and collaborative generation. Instantly everyone at the table was able to talk about the new idea, adding on improvements and creating new sketches for similar concepts. The energy was tangible as my group of quiet talkers suddenly came alive.

The Design Studio

After the workshop all six designers gathered to share and discuss the outcomes of our separate groups. Across our many ideas we saw a clear solution for how a real-time data visualization system might be built. We decided to pursue three parts of the system: student input on a mobile device, teacher dashboard, and a group display visible to students and teachers in real time.

We spent the next few hours brainstorming around the three different touch points and sketched a few detailed drawings for how the solutions might work.

Teacher Facing

May and Jeremy worked out a web app and iPad app design based off the rubric used for standards-based grading. Jeremy had the idea to include social features allowing for peer review with other teachers and among students.

Student Facing

Clint, Takao and Courtney envisioned a system of dynamic mobile devices that would allow students to collaborate by subject matter and assignment within a classroom.

Group Facing

Derek, Mo and I started with the idea that we could use games and a highly visible “leaderboard” to give students the sense that they’re all contributing toward the common goal of learning. We designed a game that would reflect each student’s progress in a lesson.

A Day Well Spent

I headed into the workshop with an understanding of how to move a group of high school students in the direction of a solution. It was much different working with my group of educated adults whose heads are already full of optimized solutions. I quickly saw the value of throwing out wacky ideas and adding or removing brainstorming constraints to get them to think outside of what is normally expected.

Spending the day with a group of talented folks was enlightening and enriching for me. As is often the case, I learned as much from the workshop participants and other designers as they might have learned from me.

Sharing in the mutual exchange of knowledge and awareness was refreshing and delightful. I look forward to many more workshop opportunities to come!

Tags: conferences, education, sketching, teaching, workshop
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