This workshop focuses on the following Summit themes:
What is next for interaction design education?
Relationships between industry and education
BACKGROUND
Today, young learners have an abundance of technology available to them at home, from toys like Legos or LittleBits to all-purpose tools like iPads. These products provide students with a vast array of engaging, personalized experiences that allows parents to have fun while learning with their children. Understandably, these products designed with a single-user in mind are also priced with a single family in mind, so that the product is a reasonable purchase for families in their target market.
However, when a teacher comes across these learning products and wants to use them in her classroom, she is constrained by the cost of purchasing individual kits at a larger scale. Whether the teacher chooses to buy one kit per student or one kit per group of 3-5 students, the cost becomes quite significant for most teachers and schools. In many cases, the cost of bulk purchasing of learning products becomes prohibitive. But even if a teacher is able to find the funds to purchase enough kits for her students, she then has the added challenge of devising ways to adapt learning products created with a single user in mind to be used by group of 3 or more students.
For many educational technology companies, their business strategy focuses on creating products for individual students because that has been seen to be a scalable and profitable approach. We want to question this notion by discussing the possibility of designing products for small group use in classrooms that are priced with bulk purchasing in mind and by brainstorming innovative learning product ideas for the classroom market.
In particular, this workshop will focus on these questions:
What impact would focusing on the classroom learning experience (as opposed to the single user at home) have on the design of learning products?
What are the pros, cons and considerations to focusing corporate business strategy on bulk purchasing by classrooms and schools?
…
How could collaborative, interactive learning experiences shape the learning and play that happens in classrooms?
WORKSHOP GOAL
In this workshop, participants will:
Play with several popular interactive learning products
Discuss the pros and cons of each for use in collaboration and the business strategy of edtech companies
Apply a design thinking process to create a new interactive learning prototype, with collaboration and scale in mind.
FORMAT (2h 30 min total)
Part 1 - Introduction and Floating stations (30 min)
Workshop presenters will introduce the workshop and agenda, and then attendees will work through several stations where they can experience a variety of learning products with the lens of potential for classroom use in mind.
Part 2 - Discussion (20 min)
Attendees will discuss their experiences trying out the learning products, how they might adapt them for classroom use and how they might be re-designed with classroom use and bulk purchasing in mind.
Part 3 - Design think on new collaborative learning prototype (1 hour)
Attendees, in teams, will work through the design thinking process to prototype innovative, collaborative learning products.
Part 4 - Presentations (30 min)
Teams will present their prototype to the larger group.
Part 5 - Wrap-up (10 min)
Open discussion about the session