Design Thinking Workshops for Kids
While a lot of children expressly don’t enjoy school, I’ve never heard one say they don’t like learning.
It’s no surprise that many children don’t like school. Schools typically encourage passive learning processes, which shorts the active construction of new skills. Kids are not miniature adults, and they have even less interest in rote memorization and graded assessments than we do. According to the Neuroscience of Joyful Education, when we take away play and independence from the classroom, we stop our students from effective information processing and long-term memory storage. Not only that, with the more standardized tests we cram into the school year, the more anxious, bored, and distant our young learners become. Ultimately, they learn to dread school, to see it as a necessary evil that must be suffered through to achieve other goals.
Many well-meaning teachers and organizations have tried to fix this problem through gamification, but this sentiment is misguided. Though gamification can increase engagement if well-executed, mandatory “play” is not engaging. Even the simple act of attaching extrinsic rewards, like stars or badges, to a lesson can make it seem less voluntary, which potentially hurts both motivation and performance.
Learning by itself is joyful, and, to get children to enjoy the act of school more, all we have to do is connect them again with the process.
Opportunities
The Carolina Center for Educational Excellence is a joint-venture between the Chapel Hill-Carrboro City Schools and the UNC School of Education to be a distance learning center for the state of North Carolina.As a creative technologist and learning experience designer for the CCEE, I designed workshops and creative learning experiences to better connect children with school material and to teach them new technologies.
Projects worked on: A “design thinking for kids” educational video curricula, tech workshops
Learning Design Principles
Constructivism, Project-Based Learning, Self-Regulated Learning, Problem-Based LearningProcess
I started by watching old episodes of Reading Rainbow and Wishbone. As an older sister of the 90s, I remember how much wonder and excitement for stories those shows sparked in my younger brothers. Though neither of them particularly enjoyed reading, seeing those programs made them more interested in hearing and writing stories, as well as asking me to give them some of my books. These were boys who hated reading – who’d rather go out and play in the mud, or whatever seven-year-old boys do – suddenly wanting to devour five hundred pages of Harry Potter and borrow all of the library’s If You Give a Mouse a Cookie books.For the technology workshops, I wanted children to feel the same spark, and to be excited to engage and develop new skills. Children generally like to learn about things they’re already interested in (like the history of dinosaurs or how to play music), but may not always feel motivated to for things they’ve decided they don’t like.
To help make the workshops more engaging, I made educational videos to teach my participants design thinking, so that they could practice using the technologies in new ways, rather than simply follow prescribed instructions. A darling of designers, the design thinking framework allows people to take solution-based approaches to find original answers to problems. Unfortunately, because lessons from design thinking are mired in organizational language, they’re not exactly kid-friendly.
I thought funny, entertaining videos would help make the material more engaging for students. My own interest and appreciation of children’s media informed the visual style of my videos. I knew I wanted them to exude energy to get students excited about design thinking, but I also needed them to feel grown-up, not patronizing or preachy, so as not alienate my young viewers.
To develop this script, I conducted five qualitative interviews with students aged 10 through 13, to see what they did and did not understand about design thinking. This allowed me to better create videos that would fill knowledge gaps. To design each one, I used Adobe Premiere Pro and Illustrator, leveraging the technologies to make bright, colorful shorts.
Outcomes
The videos were integrated into classrooms at the CCEE, and were also used for adult learners in UNC’s Department of Education. The most popular short among both children and adults was Ideation, perhaps because of its fantastical nature.Technology Workshops
As part of my role as the CCEE's creative technologist, I researched and engineered workshops in various technologies for students at Smith Middle School. The design thinking videos played a key role in encouraging unconventional applications of the edtech tools, which deepened learning.The ability to creatively think about, organize, frame, and mould new information is as imperative to learning process as considering and understanding the actual material. The design thinking videos introduced the students to more structured ways of creatively thinking, which improved their workshop experiences and learning outcomes.
Some of my favorite workshops are below. As a disclaimer, because of CCEE safety policies, photos and videos of our Smith Middle School participants are not shown. Any photos are with college-aged students and published with express permission of Derek Creason, director of the CCEE.
Makey Makey
OVERVIEW
In September 2019, students visiting from Ecuador attended a day-long technology workshop at the CCEE.
ROLE
Ran workshop for the electronic invention tool Makey Makey, trained students in how to use VR technology, and helped plan and coordinate event.
RESULTS
Post-workshop, students reported enjoying the opportunity to use new technologies to imagine new ways of interacting with the world, and that they especially enjoyed Makey Makey, a tool that connects "everyday" objects, like bananas or Play-Doh, to computer programs. Perhaps the most delightful moment of the workshop was when the students realized they could act as conductors, and they linked hands to create an electrical current.
MistyRobotics
Overview
Misty is a personal robot who is purpose-built for developers and is readily extensible via third-party APIs, hardware modifications, and additional sensors. Though she’s no Rosie the Robot Maid, Misty can be programmed with a variety of skills and abilities, including bringing coffee.
At the CCEE, we taught her to recognize faces, introduce herself to new visitors, play podcasts, and dance, among other things. In this video, you can see her showing me different Halloween costumes.
Arduino
overview
Arduino is an open-source electronic prototyping platform enabling users to create interactive electronic objects. In January 2020, I planned and developed a workshop for sixth-grade students to practice and learn the technology.
Virtual Reality
Overview
The director of the CCEE (Derek Creason) and I created a VR experience for the Ackland Art Museum together. The video was shot on an Insta360 ONE X camera. The exhibits included are “Yayoi Kusama: Open the Shape Called Love,” “Toriawase: A Special Installation of Modern Japanese Art and Ceramics,” and “Color Across Asia.”
This VR experience is primarily used in workshops for educators, especially in the humanities, who want to integrate virtual reality into their classrooms.