Developing Ipad apps for Early Childhood Classrooms

DD+D was invited back, this month, to Columbia College's Visual Presentation class to deliver our Design Empathy workshop. The workshop was held at the Steelcase show room at the Mart.
The design brief for the project required the student designers to create  Ipad apps, and Ibooks for early childhood education teachers. Our goal was to help the student designers to empathize with the needs of all stakeholders including; teachers, young students. We created personas and acted out scenarios to understand the client's needs.

Here is the design brief, breakdown of project activities, and student designer feedback on DD+D session....

DESIGN BRIEF: developing Ipad apps for early childhood classrooms

New opportunities are constantly opening up in the various educational environments as digital technology and new media platforms emerge. In colleges and universities we’ve been using virtual classroom tools (blackboard, skype, basecamp, google docs, etc.) for more than 10 years to deliver material to students both synchronously and asynchronously. In elementary, secondary, and high school many of these tools are also used. However in the early childhood environment where children are learning very rapidly to do so many things from manipulating physical puzzles to developing crucial social skills, technology has not been as vital or necessary.

With the increase and growing sophistication of mobile technology, earlier access by more and more children, although certainly not all, and genuine curiosity with the devices and the apps/games they afford, we are witnessing a paradigm shift of technology down into the pre-school, kindergarten and early elementary school years. This simple phenomenon when combined with the emergence of intuitive authoring tools like Ibooks author and InDesign allow for educators to develop teaching tools for the ipad that augment established books and other support materials. The process can be fast and the results can be tested and refined right in the classroom.

As product designers we are trained to be generalists and to explore emerging opportunities like these through direct observation, interviews, and primary research posted on line or in journals.  In this project we will be collaborating with Early Childhood Education students to develop teaching scenarios for their classrooms. We will be using many of the visualization skills from previous assignments as well as new ones to develop scenarios that will lead to storyboards of interaction, and finally tasks/games that can be quickly built and tested on an ipad using ibooks author. The project will involve several stages and require interaction/collaboration with the Early Childhood Education students led by professor Mary Quest. Because the respective courses do not occur at the same time the groups will be communicating as much as possible through a range of cloud-based collaborative tools.

INITIAL BREAKDOWN OF ACTIVITIES:

Task 1:                      Setup collaborative space

Task 2:                      Review video documentation of student teaching (before 3.18.13)

Milestone 1:               Develop initial scenarios around a range of topics for review

Task 3:                      Get feedback from student teachers

Task 4:                      Bodystorming workshop withh DD+D

Milestone 2:               Create storyboards to define either existing problems or opportunities

Task 5:                      Transform storyboards into videos as communication tool (upload)

Task 6:                      Get feedback and refine scenarios.

Milestone 3:               Develop concepts for testing using ibooks author and ipads.

Student designers' feedback

"It was nice working in groups and coming up with personas and scenarios to put ourselves in other people's shoes."

"It helped get us to visualize the process of research. Also, really getting involved with it creates a better understanding.

"Exploring where the teachers and students are coming from and experiencing was a great way to do research."

"The workshop helps encourage all to step out of their own mind and into an empathetic state."

"It was informative yet entertaining and engaging."

"A great work environment to work and learn"

"Today's session was very effective. Empathy can be difficult. It was very helpful to learn some theatre tools to help."

"It was great to warm up and take on the empathy challenges. Stand up,sit down, moves my mind also body."

About DD+D/ What is Bodystorming?

About DD+D

DD+D is the name given to Dramatic Diversity’s (http://www.dramaticdiversity.com/) offerings in the various fields of design. DD+D has an innovative approach to helping designers use acting methodology and improvisation to engage in the design process as well as communicate and collaborate around design possibilities. DD+D uses bodystorming, embodied dramatic personas, realistic scenarios, participatory design, and forum theatre techniques to help designers empathize with users.

For more info please reach us at byron@dramaticdiversity.com

Bodystorming

Explore this unique mentod for bringing innovate ideas to life!

Bodystorming is a participatory method for demonstrating or developing ideas in a physical setting. Team members explore ideas and interactions physically, using props such as maps or photos to give a sense of place. Bodystorming goes beyond brainstorming by giving an idea a physical form and acting it out in different contexts. The process is designed to uncover how the relationships between people, locations and things affect ideas in ways that written scenarios cannot. It enables rapid iteration of ideas and relationships through a dynamic process of acting and evaluating. The process reveals how people interact with services, products and each other on a physical, emotional and intuitive level.

We believe that Bodystorming is a powerful design/research tool to understand how people obtain desired experience under various contexts in an embodied way.

WHY BODYSTORM?

UX designers are becoming overwhelmed by the mass of design research data they now have access to. Experience designers need to return to core design principles by having better empathy with the users in the context of their everyday lives. We do this by rapidly re-framing the problem in succession over the course of just a few seconds. By creating and “performing” a vision of the future that requires no sophisticated technologies other than people’s bodies to explain, clients or patrons need only “watch” and be entertained to understand. Bodystorming is an innovation tool that helps to create stories or themes out of the things we observe around us- the things we perceive- and translate this knowledge into rapid communication and generation of ideas around an envisioned scenario. It is also a way to allow people to be people, by working together in tight Generate- Do- Learn cycles to engage one another in simulating experiences and processes by designing them through joint acting and improve

Dennis Schleicher, Sears ux, researcher, DD+D partner, and practitioner of the technique considers "Bodystorming" to be used in three ways:

Bodystorming Type I

Working in the Space/Place your product will be used in – Let’s say you have been hired to build a new cash register interface for a cafe down the street. Bodystorming I says that you should go the the cafe and do your work there. I didn’t say analysis, but work. So go there and do all your design and coding there. The idea is that just be being in the environment for which your product is supposed to be for you will build it better. Things such as loud environments, feelings of safety or crime prone areas will be hard to ignore.

Bodystorming Type II

Strong Prototyping the Space/Place your product will be used in. Lets say you have been hired to build a new handheld device that will work in the hallways a submarine . Bodystorming II says that you should construct out of cardboard what the hallways of a submarine would be. Perhaps make the lighting the same (maybe red lights?) So you have test out your handheld in the “simulated” environment. Perhaps it doesn’t have all the properties of the actual field environment, but it should have some of the more important aspects of the setting. Then change constraints such as lighting, or how easy it is to walk through such spaces while holding on to PDA.

Bodystorming Type III

Use Case Theater (Prototyping the Space/Place your product will be used in using “actors” and “props”.) Let’s say you have been hired to build a new hot-dog vendor stand. Bodystorming Type III says you should get a perhaps 3 or 4 of your co-workers and have them act-out the the different roles. So you have one person be the vendor. Another person ordering their hot dog. The other people waiting in line to order. Perhaps you have them run through it for a couple of takes and you can watch and see what happens and perhaps change things up to explore different options. Such things as how long it take to service 10 people with one vendor versus two vendors, or if you add a form for people to fill out instead of telling the vendor their order.

Dennis also suggests several tips for Bodystorming , which can be found here.

Please contact us to bring Bodystorming to you byron@dramaticdiversity.com