SUMMARY

S.T.E.M. education for elementary students has been on the rise over the last 10 years. Baker's Elementary School, located in Southeast County of San Diego, CA, is implementing an 5-year experimental program where a part-time teacher, Ms. Tran, instructs every grade twice a month about a specific S.T.E.M. class that changes every year. Our group of 6 took a human-centered design approach to improve the learning within this classroom. We named our group "T2D: Teach to Design" because we wanted to include the fourth graders as co-designers for the following 10 weeks. I served as team lead for the group. While meeting the students weekly, we identified a need within the classroom, ideated solutions with the students, and on our own, prototyped our solutions. Finally, we conducted user-testing with the students and Ms. Tran. 

With two weeks left in our project, we hit a hurdle: our design wasn't solving the needs of the students and Ms. Tran effectively. After reiterating the process again, our final product became a simpler solution that promoted desirability, feasibility, and sustainability for the students and the teacher for future years to come.  

SCope

Role: Team Lead
Date: September 2016 - December 2016
Skills: Human-Centered Design, Interviewing, Ideating, Prototyping, User Testing, Leadership
Tools: Trello, Google Docs, Google Slides
Deliverables: Lesson plan series focused around human-centered design and a 46-page report about our project

In order to understand the class as whole and create a guide that would address these goals, our group made a persona for the students: “Jasmine” is a 9-year-old-girl that enjoys project-based learning, misinterprets instructions, talks a lot, and is missing the connection between her projects and real world applications. Using this user persona, we created a problem statement to guide us for the rest of the project.

We began our process by introducing ourselves to the classroom and interviewing the students to identify their needs. Our two User Liaisons worked intimately with the students to teach them the human-centered design process. The students learned the first process of human-centered design: interviewing. A majority of the students had a really hard time understanding the point of interviewing and the purpose of a "need". Our group should have taken note, as we encounter this very issue later on in the project.  

Now that we had our problem statement, we were ready to begin ideation. We had four different "How Might We" questions that provoked possibilities to solve the problem statement. One of our questions was “How might we keep students effectively engaged in project building?”.

As team lead, I needed to not only participate in the ideation process, but also facilitate it. The challenge in this was sharing my ideas to generate discussion without having my ideas dominate the brainstorming session.

Team Affinity Diagram Brainstorm

Fourth Grader's Affinity Diagram Brainstorm

To include the fourth grade students as co-designers, our two User Liaisons worked with the students intimately. After our ideation process, they simplified the "How Might We" questions to involve four simple categories of ideas and had the students create an affinity diagram as shown here. Unlike the interviewing, the students excelled at ideating because it gave them the opportunity to be creative and exercise outside-the-box thinking. We incorporated their ideas in our final solution.

LEGO TABLE

What: A modular, customizable table suitable for modern classrooms
Why: Allows for easy grouping for groups of different numbers of members thus creating a better enviornment for project-based learning 

TRI-FOLD TRAIN

What: A 3 panel, double-sided, movable whiteboard
Why: Allows the teacher to give more adequate visual aid as well as a space for students to work collabortively

TRANELECTRIC

What: A electrically-powered work place
Why: Allows for a greater variety of projects because the original classroom only has two electrical ports on the sides of the room

We approached making the TRIFOLD TRAIN with multiple, low-fidelity prototypes. Our first prototype was made out of cardboard to visualize the double-sided triangle aspect of the design. The students wanted to play with the first prototype and questioned how large the final product would look.

Although this prototype was still unable to move on wheels like in our concept, it was about 4.5 feet tall and could be folded with velcro. This prototype was much more realistic than a small cardboard. 

Our User Liaisons went to the school with this second prototype and taught a lesson about working in a team through the egg drop activity, where the students have to collectively create a way to catch an egg. Since Ms. Tran wasn't there that day, one of our User Liaisons acted as the teacher and used the second prototype in her lesson.

The prototype failed as a design. Not only did the students ignore the instructions written on the prototype, but also the User Liaison struggled using the product as the acting teacher.

Desirability, feasibility, and sustainability are the pillars of the human-centered design process. Our final product promotes desirability by allowing any teacher to be able teach the human-centered design process to their students without knowing about the process. Our final product promotes feasibility because the lesson plan series is paper and the lessons don't include more than normal classroom supplies (scissors, paper, markers). Our final product promotes sustainability because Ms. Tran adapted a lesson plan series meant for fourth graders and taught it to second graders. She even had ideas for making it more complex for fifth and sixth graders. We hope that this lesson plan series is able to be used all five years that the school is implementing engineering, and that more groups like us create additional series to the "Teaching Engineering" teaching guides.