Collaborative Learning App Design Challenge
The Collaborative Learning App Design Challenge was a 2-day design sprint held in Boston, MA, in September 2018, to solve the challenges of collaboration in Maker Education.
Role: Researcher, Learning Designer, Co-facilitator
Client: CAST, MA, USA
Learners: Educators, designers, students, professionals of all ages
Sector: Technology, K-12 Learning
Project website: http://designchallenge.cast.org/
The Brief
The maker education movement signals a return to apprenticeship models and constructivist, project-based learning and instruction, where students learn by engaging with and solving authentic, complex challenges. However, the process of making to learn is not great for everyone. The process skills needed to successfully engage in maker-space experiences are many, the most important being communication and collaboration, which are often challenging to encourage and evaluate in informal learning environment.
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As part of a multi-disciplinary research and design team at CAST, MA, we asked: How might we remove barriers to maker-space experiences and support collaborative learning?
My Design Process
Brought on board as the Design Expert for this event by CAST, I worked with a multidisciplinary team of social scientists, learning designers, and educators to conduct in-depth research into the challenges of learning in maker-spaces, and put the 2-day design sprint together in a period of 4 weeks.
We started off with knowledge-building around collaborative learning, maker education, and UDL methodology through desk research and in-depth interviews with educators, maker-space facilitators, and young learners who used maker-spaces in schools or in after-school programmes across Boston. We collated this user research into personas and scenarios that participants would use as challenges for the design process. We then proceeded to put a UDL-infused design thinking process together that participants would apply to define the problem space, then brainstorm, sketch, prototype, pitch solutions to a panel of industry experts. As this was an open event, I also helped create marketing collateral to promote the event and invite as many participants from across Boston.
Visit the event website at http://designchallenge.cast.org/ to learn more about our design process and see the amazing prototypes by the participants!
Outcome
The Collaborative Learning App Design Challenge was a two-day design challenge held in Boston, MA, in September 2018. Educators, maker-space facilitators, graduate students, learning designers, and accessibility experts gathered to understand the challenges of collaboration in maker environment, define areas they wanted to work on, and co-create prototypes of mobile and web apps that addressed their selected challenges.
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I co-facilitated this event, introducing participants to the ideas and tools of design thinking, and helping teams prototype their apps to best communicate their ideas.
Impact
More than 30 participants attended the design challenge and, in groups, prototyped and pitched 6 amazing app ideas to facilitate collaborative learning in maker-spaces to industry experts.
View some of the amazing app prototypes that our participants created here: http://designchallenge.cast.org/pitch/
Some teams have taken their app forward, and with CAST’s support, are adapting and wire-framing them to be used in classrooms across Boston, MA.
Teams create paper wireframes of their apps.
Teams present their ideas at every step to get feedback and refine their designs.
Dot-voting favourite ideas to define a collective design brief.