Concept Proposal
We are team Apple Pen. With this project we will in the span of five weeks try to create a mobile and social technology solution in a specified problem domain. We have in advance selected our problem domain and done a fair amount of background research which has helped us to explicitly define the domain and to some extent understand the context and the user requirements. This has allowed us to generate an idea of a potential design solution to the domain. We emphasize that this project is not about trying to solve the domain, but rather trough academic research methods, prototyping and user testing we want to gain a further understanding of the context and our users. That is, in short, in this project we will build a prototype and iterate on it to better understand our domain and its users.
Our selected domain became: “Learning in classrooms”. We will look at how mobile and social technologies can facilitate and improve interactions and engagement among students and teachers in a classroom setting.
Based on our own previous experiences we generally agreed that for the most part, the technologies used in the classroom usually consists of chalk blackboard or simple slideware (e.g. powerpoint), which, for us at least, often becomes quite dull. And unless the teacher actively encourages students to engage in interacting with each other, whether it be asking open questions or forming groups to do problem solving, etc. (which can also be socially intimidating for some individuals), there isn’t really too much interactions going on in a classroom. So we decided to dig a little deeper into this, finding out if there is data that supports our suspicions, what effect interactions has on learning and if there exists such solutions - what worked and what didn’t?
This background basically functioned as the base in defining our domain because it provided a good overview over key finding and considerations when dealing with technology in classrooms.
The most interesting findings where:
- That even though Powerpoints aren’t the most revolutionizing in terms of technology - when done right, the addition of colors, pictures and sound makes it a productive pedological approach
- People remember about 75% of what they see, hear AND do simultaneously - Full engagement is key
- Students that lack pedagogical technologies are creatively inferior than the ones who don't.
- Effectiveness of used technology is greatly determined by willingness and engagement of the teacher as well as the implementation
- Presenting course material in unique and/or dynamic ways engages the students
Highlights that digital devices are extremely prominent students daily lives, but this in turn has also provided new opportunities for students to be distracted in the classroom by social media, games, and the Internet. This tells us that there could be an opportunity for software on mobile platforms since the use of mobile computing in the classroom is both obiquitous and a widespread interest for.
- The external and open Internet may be harmful to students’ attention. Because redundant and irrelevant task information from Internet can be a crucial and major distractor for students. [1] Therefore, only focus on one task at one time to make sure that students can only get one environmental stimulus, especially information stimulus, is significant for helping students concentrate on their primary tasks. [1]
- People are impacted by their social community. Students are worried about to miss some important information from their social connection. They are not only distracted by their own but also distracted by other students’ behaviors.[2]
- Students need some constraints and pressure to help them concentrate on their primary tasks. Note-taking is a good way to help students focus on their class. Time pressure also can be a useful solution to regularize students’ behaviors.[1][2]
- Fresh things can catch students’ eyes. Students will be attracted by creative teaching content and forms. [2]
- Network limitation is another crucial way for helping students avoid being distracted. Block applications or set gateway on students’ digital devices while having classes can help them reduce exposure to redundant information. [2]
Students can answer questions online in a real-time system. Therefore, instructors can supervise their answers, which brings some pressure to students.
Students can only see the outlines without the details, which give them a hint that they will miss the important information if they don’t pay attention to the class.
Elaborates the difficulties and importance of interactions in the classroom in order to enhance engagement and ultimately academic performance. Also outlines some previous efforts on technological solutions to the domain, what worked and what didn’t. These include:
- The use of clickers to respond to questions in the lecture. Effectively engages students more than without, but there was no measurable learning improvement and there are equipment costs, in terms of both time and money, associated which makes deployment in large classrooms hard.
- Using twitter as a platform for asking questions(the suggested solution from the paper). Effectively took advantage of the distributed presence of smartphones. Survey results showed that the scheme which consists of teacher presenting and students engaging/interacting with their phone screens effectively engages and improves student learning. The main issues identified were the assumption that everyone has a twitter account and that there are some people who are reluctant to make one.
The article discusses the idea generation and team formation. It introduces two computer tools – Creativity Connector which is a social network tool to connects users who wish to participate in common project; Wikideas which helps to facilitate the generation of ideas in groups. To form creative teams, Creativity Connector makes use of the rating values assigned by each user to different ideas in Wikideas. With these values, the tool calculates the affinity between participants so that two participants who have similarly rated the same ideas will have a high affinity.
Finding:
A higher affinity of ability, ideas, and personality of team members can maximize the team cooperation efficiency and improve the affinity between team members.
Educators are constantly challenged to find ways to keep students’ attention in class when, outside of school, their world is full of all kinds of highly compelling and visually stimulating media. Many educators find that gamifying learning keeps students engaged.
For example, BreakoutEDU is an educational game platform that includes a curated set of physical materials—think padlocks, boxes and invisible ink—and activities across a wide range of subjects and grade levels. Students might sort images annotated with letters by the state of matter (solid, liquid, or gas), for instance, revealing a secret code word that gets them one step closer to the goal. BreakoutEDU is a physical game platform, requiring a significant amount of planning and manual configuration—setting combinations locks, writing clues on hint cards, hiding clues around the classroom—and then supervising the activity as the teams go about their gameplay.
The lecture will proceed as normal, but the teacher can surprise interrupt the class by prompting a question related to what has previously been said. The question can be posted verbally and/or on some platform. The students will trough some mobile device recieve a notification(vibration?) that lets them quickly access and answer the question. A scoring system will keep track of the students score during the lecture and a high score will be maintained, introducing a game element to the concept and thereby a sense of achievement. Lecture continuous as normal after a certain time limit until a new question is prompted. Can be used to facilitate teachers need to track the progress of the class, mark attendance, quiz performance, individually and as a class. Maybe players can (If they want) make profiles which are customizable, achieve prizes(customizable) and badges and achieve rankings based on their performance. The design of the concept will make good use of colors, animations and sound to better engage the participants
- The solution will preferably be light-weight in terms of setting up/preparing/executing questions and answers. This requirement is identified by looking at the existing solution "Kahoot.it" which relatively takes a lot of time to prepare (i.e before class starts). We would like to have something that could enable questions "on-the-go" if the teacher would suddenly feel the need for it.
The solution is aimed for high school and university lectures where paper [1] identified that in these large(r) types of classrooms effective interaction between students and lecturers is hard. More specifically in the types of lectures where course material is delivered as a presentation, i.e. the teacher talks and students usually just listens for the entire lecture. In this type of audience the use of mobile devices is also highly present, as mentioned earlier.
- Based on the domain area, we will conduct more research on the existing solutions such as Kahoot, CSCW software or even Google document. It provides us the insights that what our concept is different from them and what we can modify or improve to better meet the requirements of our target audiences.
- Several Qualitative/ quantitative research methods will be conducted aims to gather information from users. We will conduct methods such as interview, focus groups or observation based on our target audience and further investigate their experience in class. The problem area of the research process will be focused on the lecture content engagement for both students and the teaching staff.
- Based in the data we collect from the research, we can analyze the establish requirements. We can use an affinity diagram which can group our large amount of data into themes and come out key insights. Also, we can conduct brainstorming methods such as SCAMPER/Five whys which can broaden our insights and find out more possibilities. After the analysis process, we will develop our initial design based on the insights and user requirements.
- Persona
- Storyboard
- Sitemap
- First iteration:
Design and build:
For the first prototype, we will develop a low-fidelity prototype or using existing software to testing one or part of main features. It will mainly focus on the user experience with the interaction instead of the UI design of our concept.
Testing:
For the first prototype testing, we will conduct basic testing method such as observation, notes taking, TAM and interview. We can gain feedback from the intuitive user expression/feedback.
- Second iteration:
Design and build:
Based on the evaluating outcome from the first prototype testing, we will develop a high-fidelity prototype based on the alternatives. It can be web-based which can fully simulate the execution and feedback to build an interaction process.
Testing:
The second prototype testing will test both UX and UI design. Methods such as Think aloud and Pluralistic walkthrough can be applied.
- Strengths & Weaknesses:
In general, I have relatively strong capacities in design. Because I have a background in film production.(I have been studying film production for four years.) So I think I am good at pictures, videos, and audio. These may be helpful for this project. However, my ability to programming is relatively lacking, but not that weakness. It is not very hard for me to help the programmer in our team to build this project.
- Aspirations & Goals:
Through this project, I hope I can deeply understand the meaning of social and mobile. And gain more experiences of programming. I hope this project can inspire me thinking and solving problems from different point of view. Most important thing is have a good friendship between our team numbers.
- Strengths & Weaknesses:
I am good at design and UX testing. Based on the skills learned from previous courses, I have solid skills with the research method and prototype testing method. However, I am not good at coding especially JavaScript as it is important for web development.
- Aspirations & Goals:
Through the design iteration, I hope that I can practice and improve my UX design skills. From each design lifecycle, I hope that I can work with the team and develop high-quality alternatives based on the prototype testing and members' analysis process.
- Strengths & Weaknesses:
I have media, advertisement and planning undergraduate background. I watched a lot of creative advertisement cases in my undergraduate period. I had two and a half years of work experience about new media operation, game program planning, video editing, and mobile game promotion planning. My previous school tasks and jobs required me to think critically and creatively. I understand the importance of user-centered service. And I am good at editing pictures and videos by using Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Premiere. These skills may be useful for our further project. However, I lack programming skills. I only learned Python in the last semester. But I begin to have the basic understanding of the programming languages. I can have a good communication with our programmer.
- Aspirations & Goals:
This domain is my initial domain that I am interested in. I want to explore that how far we can go with this domain. Also, through this project, I hope that I can learn more programming skills and expand my mind by connecting with different thoughts and background culture. I want to practice my UX design skills and improve my communication ability.
- Strengths & Weaknesses:
I have a Business Administration undergraduate learning background which can let me think more rationally. As an Interaction Design student, I am good at design thinking, brainstorming and prototype building. I am also good at using design softwares like Adobe Illustrator and Adobe Indesign but I have a lack skill of coding.
- Aspirations & Goals:
I hope I can have a good experience of building a entire project. Also, I hope I that the previous experience of theory such as testing methods or prototype development skills can be practiced and help to contributes to the team projects.
- Strengths & Weaknesses:
I'm in my fourth year in an integrated masters degree in computer science which naturally has made me confident in programming and a range of technologies for software development. Due to the broadness of my degree I have also taken courses like HCI which have given me basic skills within design theory. I've worked a lot in teams on various projects, so I'm used to collaborating with other people and using collaboration regimes such as lean/agile/iterative processes. I use git on a daily to weekly basis. My main weakness would be that I don't have an equally strong academic background as my team members, both generally and in design. I'm also not at all familiar with prototype software.
- Aspirations & Goals:
I hope to become better at fast prototyping so I can gain insights about users that is actually helpful. I want to be able to perform good interviews yielding exclusive data that is really valuable. Building technology probes would also be very interesting to learn to do. By the end of the semester I hope to have fully understood my users needs so I have a clear Idea on how to proceed in the domain.
Our team consists of five members with different professional backgrounds and we are all postgraduate students which means we have more life experience and more studying experience as well which is matched with our project well. Some of us are good at design, while others are good at programming, which enables our team to have more comprehensive technical support, enabling us to successfully complete our project more smoothly. Generally, one group has four members, so our group can assign tasks in more detail and get more ideas. With more people providing ideas, we can open up our thinking mode and learn from each other. When encountering problems in the project or in the team, there are more solutions to solve the problems, and there are not limited solutions to solve the problems, so that a better solution can be finally chosen.
Since our concept of the project is creating a public system for students to interact in class learning, some Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) softwares like Google Drive, can be used to build the prototype to do the user testing in next process rather than creating a new one by ourselves can reduce the time cost.
Scheduling provisional meeting can be a challenge within our group due to different major with different time of taking courses. For example, last time when we wanted to organise a meeting since we found that we had not figure out which idea we were going to use before the pitch, it was quite hard to collect all the members together to discuss. Because it was a provisional meeting, we all had a course at different time. In that case, we just discussed in peer. As long as at least two team members had time at the same time, they would have a discussion, and the discussion process and results would be reflected on the Google doc and shared with the rest of the team. The efficiency of such discussion will be affected to some extent. More team members can be a strength but can also be a challenge, especially we do not have five members at the very beginning. One of our members joined us few days ago, so we need time to get used to each other. New members also need to spend more time to understand the ideas and concepts we discussed before. More members mean more ideas to be offered, and choosing the end result can be a challenge. Moreover, having one more person means finding the right time for discussion is more limited. It will also be more difficult to arrange meetings at the right time if there are any more impromptu meetings.
From the feedback of the pitch, we noticed that we need to think more specific about our project. It is necessary to consider the size of class that we would like to use our quiz room in due to a different feature might be focused. The impact or weight of the system on the process of lecturing can be another challenge for us. A one-time use of the system may expose people to it, but its effects may be short-lived after using the system, while the solutions used throughout the lecture may try to maintain full participation time, but may also lead to students' interest saturation.
The concept of our project is to engaging students in learning in class, but different students will be engaged in different aspects. There is a risk to create a system only benefit for teacher to record the attendance and be difficult for student to complete the task leading a lower grades leading students’ hates. However, there is not really a successful study system been used in class which achieve the goal of engaging students in learning which can be an opportunity for us. Another option is from team dynamics. Our team does not have a specific role for each member so we also do not have a leader. Without a leader, everyone can make good use of what they are good at. In different areas, different team members may assume the responsibility of being a leader. This gives every member of our group an opportunity to show their strengths. But there are risks. Without a fixed leader, there may be no one to take responsibility and lead people to solve problems in some cases. Without more logical organisation and arrangement, the assignment of tasks within the group may be less efficient.
Users(students): The students might be curious when they first use the Quiz Room. In this case, they might engage to learning at that moment by using their digital devices instead entertaining by using their digital devices. If every lecture uses our concept, students might be familiar with using their digital devices to participate in class learning. If students understand the knowledge more clearly and impressive that be taught in class presenting in completing assignment easily, they will be more willing to go to the lecture and join in class learning by using our Quiz Room.
Lecturer: The teacher will definitely be glad to use the Quiz Room to have a well prepared lecture. There is no doubt that lecturer expect their students to interact in class actively. Since our concept can provide the attendance recording, lecturers might organise the students’ attendance efficiently. Lecturer will feel happy as well due to the increasing amount of students to come to the course.
We’ve got some solutions and insights from our previous researches. Firstly, students can be attracted by fresh things, even the normal stuff in the classroom can be more attractive by adding some new components like colors, pictures and sound. Secondly, redundant information from the Internet can be harmful to students’ concentration. Taking notes, setting time pressure and sharing their thoughts can help students focus on their primary tasks. Thirdly, students are easily be impacted by their social connections and surroundings. Therefore, we can take advantage of the social attribute, fresh components and some constraints to help students have a better lecture learning experience.
Besides that, we also found some existing solutions for our domain. There are some existing applications and systems, for example, TurningPoint, Twitter and Creativity Connector, which can let students interact with other peers and teachers in real time in the classroom. Answering questions can be a good way like taking notes that can supervise students’ understanding of their learning materials. Also, combined with game modes can stimulate students’ mind to help them get higher engagement.
In summary, based on these previous survey and research, we decided to create a concept called Quiz Room for our problem space. We are going to combine these useful factors above to enhance the interaction experience and the engagement degree among students and teachers in the classroom. We create this concept for higher education students which also will help ourselves to find out a better way to learn in the college.
[1] Wu, & Xie. (2018). Using time pressure and note-taking to prevent digital distraction behavior and enhance online search performance: Perspectives from the load theory of attention and cognitive control. Computers in Human Behavior, 88, 244–254. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2018.07.008
[2]Exploring the Use of Tablet PCs in Veterinary Medical Education: Opportunity or Obstacle? (2014). Journal of Veterinary Medical Education, 41(2), 122–131. https://doi.org/10.3138/jvme.1013-145R1
[3]Y. Kim, S. Jeong, Y. Ji, S. Lee, K. H. Kwon, and J. W. Jeon, “Smartphone Response System Using Twitter to Enable Effective Interaction and Improve Engagement in Large Classrooms,” IEEE Transactions on Education, vol. 58, no. 2, pp. 98–103, May 2015.
[4]Ardaiz-Villanueva, Nicuesa-Chacón, Brene-Artazcoz, Sanz de Acedo Lizarraga, & Sanz de Acedo Baquedano. (2011). Evaluation of computer tools for idea generation and team formation in project-based learning. Computers & Education, 56(3), 700-711.
[5]J. Crews, “Five Ways Teachers Can Use—and Create—Augmented Reality Experiences,” EdSurge, 22-Jan-2018. [Online]. Available: https://www.edsurge.com/news/2018-01-22-five-ways-teachers-can-use-and-create-augmented-reality-experiences. [Accessed: 28-Aug-2019].