We’re constantly iterating on our own approaches. For Design Cycle 2, we created !dea Incubator Cards as a concepting tool. The cards helped to encourage a faster pace of surfacing concepts, a focus on integrating key values, and a greater comfort in abandoning concepts. These types of card games can be a method for introducing design parameters and providing some structure around brainstorming. We have 4 card types: green cards (tech trends), yellow cards (education en vogue), purple cards (learner actions), and pink cards (models to hack). From 13 concepts generated over 3 lab sessions, we narrowed in on two to further pursue. We’ll be putting a version online so that others may use these cards to help dream up new digital learning experiences too.

Walk into one of our lab sessions (like folks wandering around EyeBeam have occasionally done) and you’ll see public school teachers huddled closely with technologists, sketching on paper and typing code on laptops.  Our sessions are held after work or during the weekends, after a taxing day job teaching students or working on the latest app/web experience.

 

Which brings us to our focus for this post – it’s pretty darn challenging as folks who have full time day jobs to quickly prototype imaginative learning experiences, while also taking the time to user-test and ensure the experiences are grounded in the relevant research literature.  How can we balance it all? Read More >>

 

 

After initial concepting (where we generated lots of different of ideas), we inevitably shifted from some abstract idea to actually putting fingers to keys and coding some stuff.  What will the learner do? How? Why? With what support?   These kinds of questions requires flushing out the user experience, and putting together testing plans and questioning protocols to get feedback from learners on what works and what doesn’t – and more importantly why?

 

Concurrent with the production, iterative testing, as well as the on-going design discussions, there’s an often overlooked dimension which is the research literature review and the process of transforming theories, studies, and data into practical guidelines that can inform our feature sets and interaction mechanics.

 

Making Use of Studies
For example, one of the concepts we’ve focused on in Design Cycle 2 is “Reading Monster”, a web-app that seeks to promote active reading skills through an interactive e-book experience.   Studies have shown that simply teaching students active reading skills is only half the story, and that there is the essential step of helping students understand when they should use a specific strategy if they are struggling. Translating this into a design mechanic, does this mean we should use labels to identify the context for the application of strategies? Or perhaps they should be optional, provided only when one is struggling?

 

Other studies on active reading have shown that paired reading (where you read with another student, sometimes at a different reading level) can be effective in increasing comprehension.  Combined with research on avatars that show potential emotional bonding that can occur with users, does this mean that the design should allow for an agent (like a monster) to verbally read aloud?

 

Other studies on cognitive load makes the case that having too many directives while trying to read can be taxing for students, especially prompts that may take away from the task and may further load working memory.  Translating to design, should we distinguish between high cognitive load prompts that we purposefully place at the end of a passage versus more surface level prompts that can be embedded at the point of passage reading?

 

Avoid Getting Lost
It can be easy to get lost in all the studies, data, theories, and existing intervention approaches – many that end up looking like books that have targeted questions in between chapters, and other approaches that require face-to-face interactions.

 

The question is not just how to embed the research literature into the design process in a time-efficient way, but also how to ground the literature that may not have been conducted in naturalistic settings or be written to provide learning design guidance, but on abstract levels that are more characteristic of intellectual debate in academic circles.

 

One approach that we’ve recently taken is to synthesize the literature (on the design facilitation end) and start our design sessions with the teachers and technologists with a brief synopsis of what we’ve collected thus far, which can inform subsequent design discussions. Situating the research at the start of the design process, means we don’t waste time reading long abstract articles, but instead curated tidbits.  We’ve found that this approach moves the team to describing prototype features not just by what they do, but also by why we would expect them to have specific kinds of impacts on learners.

 

Another approach – which leverages the expertise of our lab’s teachers –  is to have the teachers model out different ways in which the theories or data supports specific techniques they use in their classroom in practical ways and then use that model to inform our design. For example we can understand the prompts on prediction are not just about asking and then moving on, but are more of a branched adaptive inquiry where based on broader prior knowledge questions, there can be more scaffolded inquiry questions made.

 

Duh… That’s Common Sense
Common sense right?  I know. Yet in the hustle and bustle of rapid prototyping, testing, iterating, day jobs, design discussions, and looking at existing products,  it’s very easy to ignore the need to sift through the reams of existing empirical evidence for specific approaches.   Beyond sifting, an equally mighty challenge is to then take those approaches and make them somehow relevant to web technology and highly interactive experiences that are often only semi-mediated by a human.

 

As we continue with these projects in Design Cycle 2, we’ll keep you posted.  We’ll also try to share more on our process and how we’re attempting to have our prototypes deeply rooted in attempts to balance it all, while still… of course….  having fun with it.

On 1/21, 1/28 and 2/7, the DTC Lab got together at Eyebeam to brew up some fresh concepts around digital learning experiences.  Using a variety of methods, we collaboratively came up with 13 rapid paper prototypes that we are narrowing down to two, which will be the focus of this second design cycle.  Check out the 13 rapid paper prototypes we came up with and feel free to tell us what you think in the comments section.

In addition to sharing our prototypes from our first design cycle, we thought it might also be helpful to recap our experience thus far.  Where we’ve been, what we learned, etc.

 

In writing this post, we opted to write it as if we were interviewing the entire DTC Lab asking it penetrating no-nonsense Charlie Rose style questions. Figured it would make for easier reading. Read More >>

 

Take me through the process quickly.  What did you do and why did you do it that way?

So the idea of the DTC Lab is to ask the question – what happens when you bring together creative teachers and technologists to go through a process of collaboratively coming up with ideas, building prototypes and iteratively tweaking them based on feedback?

There’s a translation process in two worlds meeting (eduspeak meeting techspeak and designspeak) and we’re all becoming more fluent in each others’ languages.  Over a roughly 3 month design cycle, the process entailed initially coming up with lots of ideas (ideation) and then moving to deeper concepting where we started to put together documents/sketches that mapped out the learning interaction.  Then we moved to actually putting together digital prototypes that we could then show each other, show teachers, and show students – to get feedback.  We tried to explore ideas yet ground solutions in real practical teaching and learning challenges.

 

So how did the teams look? How did they get started coming up with ideas?

So we started off with a two-day “Imagination Camp” where we brought in people from organizations like the NY Times R&D Lab and Google Creative Lab to talk and brainstorm with us about technology and learning.  From data visualization to augmented reality, we attempted to identify big emerging themes in our digital context and ways to reappropriate them for learning.

In our regular lab sessions, our teachers started talking about real challenges in the classroom and that’s where we really began …. from a design perspective.  Our teachers shared their perspectives and we began to tease out potential approaches that could be taken, which eventually led to different concepts and the final prototypes which can be seen linked off our gallery.

 

What kinds of prototypes did the DTC Lab end up generating? Can you give us a few that stand out?

Well, I might be biased, but I think all of the prototypes are pretty cool.  The prototypes each address some real world challenges in the classrooms of the teachers.  We think these underlying challenges are likely common in classrooms across the country.

One project called My Learning Story works like a daily logbook/diary where students can input how they’re feeling, what they’ve read, who they spoke with and take a data analysis perspective on their own activity.  Another project called Real Em In allows teachers to capture video and images while browsing the web and easily organize these pop culture references into “lesson hooks” that can be used to link academic concepts to real world instances of those concepts.

As you can see the projects really vary.  Two incorporate game play.  One project takes a twist on Karaoke to help special education students decode words, while another allows students to experiment with creating electronic circuits through a role-playing game.  Two of them investigated peer learning interactions.  One project involved students creating and commenting on peer-produced math tutorials, while another attempted to rethink the discussion board using a more visual multimedia interface and alternatives ways for students to respond to the persuasiveness of their arguments on each other.

 

So what does success look like for the DTC Lab? Would you say these prototypes were successful?

It’s a great question. In thinking about success we’re really looking at not just the prototypes themselves but also the collaborative process that supported the development of the prototypes, and so success is really a two-part thing.

In terms of the prototypes themselves, I think we were pretty successful in being able to generate six prototypes that we were able to gather feedback on what worked and didn’t.  Where I think the projects are strong is that they all address a real education challenge and offer some tangible solution specifications and approaches that can be further built upon.

In terms of the process, I think we were successful in that we were able to change up the process and were self-reflective about how to improve the process and continuously iterate. One of the things we want to do at the DTC Lab is figure out a framework that can enable teachers and technologists to work together in a sustainable way.  And while we didn’t start off with the perfect framework, we adjusted continuously enough that I think we have lots of data that has informed our second design cycle.

 

Well, what’s next? What does design cycle II look like? How can people not formally in the lab get involved?

We started our second design cycle in late January and plan to wrap it up at the end of May of this year. We’ve changed up quite a few things this cycle such as integrating new kinds of design methods, expanding the teams, tightening up the schedule to generate more paper prototypes more rapidly, and a host of other things. Overall we think this time around we’ll have many more ideas we’re playing with and also broader larger ideas underlying the prototypes.

For those that want to get involved I would say reach out to us. We’d love to have teachers come visit one of our lab sessions and provide feedback or just jump on the website and leave comments/thoughts. If any students want to lend their voice, we’d love to have more students involved. Check the website, follow us on Twitter and keep an eye out for our calls for feedback – we’d love to have the entire educator community involved in this.

A few of the projects from our first design cycle also seem promising to further develop beyond prototype for use by larger number of students and teachers.  For coders and developers, interested in making an impact through a project-based gig, contact us.

 

Thanks for taking the time to speak with us. 

No problem, thanks for having us.

 

 

So we’ve wrapped up Design Cycle 1 and are moving into Design Cycle 2.  What does that mean?  It means we’ll have more cool things to show you all very soon.  It also means we’ve got cool stuff to show you from the design cycle we just finished.

 

In our first three months, we’ve moved from generating concepts to building 6 trial-able prototypes.  So you can quickly get the gist of each project, we’ve put together short walk-through videos about each prototype (as well as links to the prototypes themselves).  Drop us a line if you’re interested in trying out a prototype and/or helping in its development. View Prototypes >>