普象-让好设计发光

Jam Session proved to be a great introduction to the creative module.  Quiet kids were able to project their voices; natural hams mixed it up with their Jam Session partners.  It warmed the students up to thinking about technology in different systems and in different objects than those they commonly see, while at the same time readying them to get a little crazy in the classroom.

OverviewProject Duration: 10 weeksProject Type: GraduateProfessors: Sean Donahue, Elizabeth ChinRole: Researcher, Designer, TeacherClient: Seventh Grade Students, Luzira Primary SchoolLocation: Luzira, Kampala, UgandaFor my graduate work in the Design for Social Impact sector, I partnered with Luzira Primary School in the Luzira neighborhood of Kampala, Uganda, to create an education + technology course module. This three - project course, deployed over twelve class periods across six weeks, focused on the development of creative engagement with technology on the parts of seventh grade students in Luzira Primary. This engagement stepped the students through three orientations to technology:(1) creating with a finished product: Jam Session(2) modeling creation and distribution of finished products through existing SMS based networks in the form of illustrated stories: Public Reading(3) the creation of a self initiated and distributed product in the form of personal, real time narratives

Two Part Project

As I developed Public Reading, I saw that this was an opportunity to use a model to on ramp the kids into writing and trading their stories through a mobile platform. In order to do this, I broke the project into two parts. I first modeled the idea, digitizing stories from purchased books. The pages were projected in the classroom for the kids to read as a group as well as distributed via SMS in the same way music files were. In the second part, the kids created their own stories, which were then digitized, read via projection, and traded as well. This allowed the students to start creating their own narratives with the express purpose of carrying them in their SIMs and trading them outside of the classroom.

In preparation for this project, I sat down for a lengthy interview with Luzira Primary Principle Charles Tamale. I wanted to understand what his perspective on the curriculum was, what the school had in assets, and what he envisioned as its needs for the future.Principal Tamale agreed that technology should be an integral part of education. He was open to the idea of reading and writing on a digital and / or mobile platform. Thusly, I was able to proceed with my design experiments with both his conceptual and actual backing. Digitization

In concepting the nuts and bolts of this project, I designed and drew a simple rig to mechanize the digitization of the reading materials.

I then digitized the books The Lazy Lion, The Greedy Zebra, and The Craft Chameleon by Kenyan author Mwenye Hadithi and New Zealander illustrator Adrienne Kennaway.

Part One: Model Product Projection & SMS Trading

In the classroom, I used the UNICEF Mobistation to project the book images on to the wall. The students read the stories silently to themselves, sitting as a group, like in a movie. The change of the slides mimics the event of page turning, creating a dual situation: (1) the students know when others are done, taking their movements and manners as clues and (2) it causes the group to go forward more or less together, calling for a slide change as each individual becomes ready, and choosing to either wait patiently for the ones who have not called or to pressure them into coming along to the next page. In this way, silent reading actually became a social activity itself, an interesting development for book reading, a millennia old technology whose normal user-to-device ratio is 1-to-1.

Part Two: Original Stories, Projection & SMS Trading

User ResearchIn order to gauge the students' reaction to the first round of Public Reading and prepare them for the next, I composed two questionnaires. These got them thinking about their experience with the product model, as well as on ramping them for original writing.

Research MethodologyAlthough not the height of design research tradecraft, surveying as a methodology was suited to both the field environment and the subjects. In Luzira, there were no private classrooms in which to conduct interviews, and no cordoned off space in which I could interact with the students away from the other grades outside. Privacy was not even at a premium; it was vanishingly scarce. I knew this from my initial grounds research in the previous fall. For this reason, conversation or methods such as mind mapping or values maps that require large space and multiple writing utensils as a research methodology were out. Such are the questions field research raises. On the flip side, students are used to responding to questions written in lists, unlike people who have been out of school for a while. Additionally, this allowed me to prep them for two writing based projects: part B of Public Reading and, following, YrStory. For these reasons, I chose surveying as a straightfor