Collaborative Communication With e-Learning
SD5528 Graduate Studio Workshop I
MDes Interaction Design 2010-2011 School of Design The Hong Kong Polytechnic University
Design Report
Content
Introduction Assignment Progress Research Secondary research Definition of e-learning Background Competing products Primary research Student Profile Activities & Task Map Teacher Profile Activities & Task Map Brian Chan Shek Chuen (10625289G) Liu Yaming (10533684G) Mark Bowers (10546968G) MDes Interaction Design 2010-2011 School of Design
Understanding design Experience strategy Teacher Student
Concept Interaction model Basic design User testing Revised design Second user testing Yodel Problem & objective Information architecture Key interfaces Users scenario Scenario1 Scenario2 Scenario3 Conclusion Reflections Special thanks & Sponsor
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Chapter 1
Introduction
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Chapter
1
Assignment
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Progress
wk 1 wk 2 wk 3 wk 4 wk 5 wk 6 wk 7 wk 8 wk 9 wk 10 wk 11wk 12wk 13wk 14
This report compiles our four month research and design project targeted towards collaboration, learning, and technology use in educational environments for young kids studying in Hong Kong Primary schools. Collaborated with the Hong Kong Applied Science and Technology Research Institute and a local primary school in order to focus on how kids learn, and the best way to deliver content in a meaningful learning experience.
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Concept Development Concept Evaluation / Refinement
e-Learning is a global trend, and will not fade away because it provides necessary resources to students that are otherwise unavailable. It connects them to information from around the world, as well as offers the flexibility to allow users to learn anywhere and anytime.
In-depth Research/ Research Synthesis and Translation
Using technology to deliver content is the essence of e-Learning, but Bernard Luskin reminds us, “e should be interpreted to mean exciting, energetic, enthusiastic, emotional, extended, excellent, and educational in addition to ‘electronic’.”
Contextual and Directional Research
To develop an e-Learning program that creates a positive student centric learning experience that enhances both interactivities and collaboration between teachers and students, in and out of the classroom.
Primary Resarch and Secondary Research Problems on Learning and Teaching Persona(teacher/student) Observation Objective Experience Strategies Insights (teacher/student) Activities Map (teacher/student) Task Map (teacher/student) Basic Concept Interaction Model Idea Development
Insights (teacher/student) 1st Paper model User testing 2st Paper model
Flash demo Refine information architecture-diagram
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Chapter 2
Research
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Chapter
Definition of e-learning
Bernard Luskin reminds us that
e
2.1
, an e-Learning pioneer
should be interpreted to mean
exciting, energetic, enthusiastic, emotional, extended, excellent, and educational in addition to “electronic.�
Here we compare and contrast competing e-learning platforms and review published articles, papers, and other pertinent documents to better understand the issues and context within which we were working. In addition, we looked at alternative teaching styles, kids interest in current technology, how iPads were being used as teaching tools and Gardner’s Multiple Intelligences. This proved to be a useful starting point and acted as a way to ground our observations and goals and work towards something more creative, engaging, useful, and meaningful for all the stakeholders. It helps establish functional requirements, performance standards, and other benchmarks that need to be in place for a successful e-learning program.
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Chapter
2.2
Background
The Education Reform in recent years aims to help students achieve wholeperson development and acquire an attitude for life-long learning, preparing talents for our society and country, and raising the competitiveness of Hong Kong as an international city. In a knowledge-based society, students need to learn how to learn and acquire generic skills such as communication, creativity and critical thinking. Learning and teaching strategies, if used appropriately with well-defined learning objectives and styles, will give the best results. Professional teachers should know their students and have a wide repertoire of pedagogical strategies. They should be able to adjust their teaching to cater for the needs, abilities and response of students, so as to get students engaged in their learning, think proactively and seek the joy of learning. In line with this development and the paradigm shift of learning and teaching, e-Learning is to use the electronic media to promote various learning and teaching strategies for helping students achieve learning targets. In today’s information-rich world, e-Learning not only could promote self-directed learning, cope with students’ diversified learning abilities and styles, but also serve as an effective means for students to pursue life-long learning.
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2.2
Hong Kong schools have been subject to education reform in recent years in an attempt to help students achieve a more competitive advantage by fostering personal development and an attitude for life-long learning. In a rapidly advancing technology and knowledge-based society, different pedagogical strategies need to be explored to allow for students to grow their communication, critical thinking skills, and creativity. e-Learning is a solution that could be implemented to promote self-directed learning and autonomy and effectively combat the various learning and teaching strategies that have changing and evolving. In addition, e-Learning is a global trend, and will not fade away because it provides necessary resources to students that are otherwise unavailable. It connects them to information from around the world, as well as offers the flexibility to allow users to learn anywhere and anytime.
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Chapter
Competing products
2.3
Insights: Services like Moodle were very text-based and hard to understand for students and even teachers to use. On the other hand, e-Class was simpler to use but required various different services to be bought and installed and was an expensive alternative. Social Media is becoming pervasive and is becoming ingrained in the fabric of our daily lives, school is not an exception. For more on this, and additional insights and their implications, look further into this report.
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Chapter
Primary Research
2.4
Primary research is information, insights, and learning we discovered on our own through various tool sets and workshops. Often working directly with teachers and students, we sought to uncover the people’s thoughts, feelings, perceptions and rationales about different topics. With this information we can look for actionable insights and begin to formulate an effective design, a design synthesis - turning research into a smart product.
Co-Design Workshops
How: Gathering a group of students and teachers together we engaged them with various activities and tasks to identify different problems, goals, and desires. Why: Having a group together proved to be an efficient way to spend our time because we could interact with all at once, or break them into groups, or work individually. For different activities being in groups worked well because they would build on top of others advice and/or debate solutions or problems they arrived at. We were able to gather a comprehensive collection of research that ranged from qualitative to quantitative data, and offered up many insights into the working and school life of these students and teachers that would not have been possible from secondary research.
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2.4
Surveys and Questionnaires
How: Ask a series of targeted questions in order to ascertain particular characteristics and perceptions of the stakeholders. Why: We were able to get a large sample of answers in a short period of time, and it was useful for revealing the students and teacher’s activities, perceptions, and values as well as patterns among them. Asking questions about their daily lives in school and home forces them to examine and express the underlying reasons for their behavior and attitudes. Insights: We gained various valuable insights from these questionnaires and surveys and turned them into actionable experience strategies and objectives, which will be shown later in the report.
Activity Maps - Flow Analysis
How: Draw diagrams representing the flow of information or activity through all phases of a system or process, including but not limited to all the tasks, actions, agents, etc. Why: Looking at how teachers and students go about their daily activities and tasks proved useful for identifying bottlenecks and opportunities for functional alternatives. We also found instances of overlap, as well as excessive complexities - diagraming the tasks offers a useful way to identify and prioritize which issues need to be addressed. Insights: There is a lot of busy work being done, additionally, the way we thought people worked together proved to be different than how they actually work, and there are many more additional examples.
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2.4
Classroom Observation
How: Attend classes at PLK Chee Jing Yin Primary School and observe as a bystander. Why: To better understand the relationships and classroom dynamics of students and their teacher in the classroom setting. This also allowed us to notice different kinds of social relationships within the class and map the network of their interactions. Insights: Observing was key to understanding social norms and class collaboration, people’s mental models and participation. At any time there are lots of different classroom dynamics and there are different needs for each individual stakeholder.
Paper-model Prototypes (Experience Modeling)
How: A rough prototype of the e-Learning service was made of cut-out paper and sketches to illustrate our approach and evaluate our basic design concepts and usability. By asking the students to describe aloud what they are thinking while performing the task we were able to understand both what they do, say, and think while using the prototype. Why: We had multiple incarnations of the prototype to help refine as we moved along and it acts as a useful way to quickly organize, articulate, and visualize interaction design concepts. During use they can also articulate their thoughts and help us better understand their motivations, concerns, perceptions, and reasoning. Insights: We added and took away different features and functions throughout the process because of issues of usability, expectation, and comprehension.
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Chapter
2.5
2.5
Student Profile
Kevin 10 Years Old Student Grade 5 Kevin is a hardworking boy, who focuses on schoolwork and after school programs. He loves playing in the orchestra after school because it lets him spend time with friends. After orchestra he goes home to work on his homework, it usually takes him around 2-3 hours to finish. Kevin often has more homework, online readings and e-learning work, but seldom completes them. He doesn’t like using the e-Learning program because the extra work doesn’t count for anything, and he knows his teacher will not even check the work for accuracy, so he ignores it.
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2.2
2.5
discussion sharing feedback notice email teacher
student
Communication
sharing, review feedback
assignment
E-learning Student
orchestra/choir
exercise
sports
inclass activities game
after school activities clubs
computer
tutorials
general studies language
lesson
music/sports/art/computer
At School meet friends play
recess/lunch time
Student Activity
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study
Student Activities
daily e-learning reading
schedule homework group learning
reading research
tutors/homework
At Home
Management
workshop
MSN/Facebook
math
Learning
portfolio/profile
responsibility
club activities TV
family time
Task Maps
dinner study
activities assigned by parents
sports music reading
Student Activity and Task Maps
Here we have two different diagrams depicting a students responsibilities and activities during the day. Listing out and connecting all of the activities helps to show holes or problem areas where efficiency, communication, and management can be improved.
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Chapter
2.6
2.6
Teacher Profile
Miss Kowk 7 years teaching exp. Teacher P.4 Miss Kowk is about to start her 7th year teaching P.4 at the local primary school and she is looking forward to the class. Recently the school has employed the use of e-Learning programs that can be accessed by students on their home computers. Mrs. Kowk does not know how useful the program is because it is mostly review and there is nothing new taught, and the content is not that similar to what is being taught in class. She was asked to oversee and grade the online content, but argued that she is already too busy and can’t spend her time grading two separate curriculum’s.
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2.6
2.6
School network in class
discussion sharing feedback notice email
after class School network
sharing
school website telephone face to face handbook
teacher
parents
email/MSN meeting
face to face
feed back
sponsors publishers field trips
teacher
other school school
students
Communication
companies
collaboration
Communication Paperwork
Prepare for Extra-Curricular Activities
Admin.
Budget Estimations
Teacher Activities
Teach
Permission Forms Admin Meeting
Preparation
class room field trip corrections/grading counselling
E-learning
add material -upload content
Preparation
-edit content -share transfer
Task Maps
Syllabus
Collaboration Study
Group Preparation
Workshop Trip
Individual Changes
Student Activity
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feedback
Teacher
Course Development Accreditation/Validation
student
Evaluations
grades -semester -assignments feedback/comments -online -written -in person
e-learning
add material evalvations organizationgs
Teacher Activity and Task Maps
Completing the same analysis for teachers, we find they have many more activities and responsibilites. It provides many aspects to consider and design for to help improve specific areas of the experience. There are significant variations in needs for both the student and teachers, demonstrated above.
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Chapter 3
Understanding Design
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Chapter
Insights & Experience Strategies
3.1
Collecting our research, we began evaluating it both individually and holistically. What we worked to discover were actionable insights that could be synthesized into experience strategies and eventually objectives to design for. We have developed seperate strategies for teachers and students.
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3.1
3.1
Teacher
Insight
Desired Experience
Design Strategies
1. Planning classes and the syllabus are not a one person job, but rather completed by a group of teachers coordinating together.
Enables me to understand the content.
Content is the focus, with minimal interface.
2. Task-based learning is more effective for Primary School Students.
Learn by doing, not by lecturing.
Provides task-based learning exercises.
3. Kids have short attention spans, usually only paying attention for around 20 minutes.
Allows me to choose my own path.
Tabs for switching between topics.
Lets me work the way I want to work.
Allows for organization and customization.
Desired Experience
Design Strategies
1. Students are able to plan and manage their own schedules, yet they are not given the chance.
Offers flexibility in working with others.
Allows for group and individual settings.
2. Most work in Primary School is group work in teams of 3 to 5 students, with 1 group leader.
Lets me review my work easily with others.
Simple and easy to use.
3. Work is not completed or fully understood on their own; students talk to their teachers, parents, and peers to discover answers.
Supports my continual development.
Offers a dynamic, adaptive feedback system.
4. Students need validation, they want their work to be appreciated and can not be expected to work just for the sake of working.
Gives me a chance to be responsible.
Allows for personalization and management.
4. Kids when working in groups usually have a team leader, it is not “everyone for themselves.�
Student
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Insight
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Chapter
Concept
Looking at the teaching and the student task maps, common links and overlaps become apparent. By combining the two maps together, you can begin to see how communication acts like a bridge connecting them together.
Conncet Communication
‘All problems can be stated as problems of communication’.* assignment
sharing
CLMS Learning
Management
Review
Subject responsibility
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3.2
Learning Management Systems (LMS) have not been very succesful in the past so we wanted to take a more novel approach. We added ‘C’ onto ‘LMS’, to emphasize communication and the important role it plays in teaching and learning. After combining the two task maps together, we can see a clear divide pointing to 3 aspects: Communication, Learning, Management. These three activities can fulfill our early research insights of meeting sharing, assignment and responsibility needs. We named our communication feature CONNECT, learning and teaching is SUBJECT and management as REVIEW.
Richard McKeon, Communication, truth and society, Freedom and History and Other Essays: An Introduction to the Thought of Richard McKeon, P.90
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Chapter
3.3
Below is our Interaction model, it is an overview of relationships and activities between teachers and students while using our YODEL.
3.3
This example scenario demonstrates how teachers collaborate and students work and learn together, using YODEL.
Intaraction model
Teachers
Learning
Evaluation
Share/Collaboration Learning Teaching Share/Collaboration Preparation
Teacher
Communication
Communication
Student
Management
Students 38
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Chapter
Basic Design
3.4
Connect
Offering users the ability to connect, keeping you in touch - with who matters to you, and your learning. Teachers are able to collaborate to develop teaching materials, as well as share and search for common materials. A centralized email and instant message system helps facilitate collaboration and communication of between teachers, as well as communication between students.
Subject
Simple and straightforward, it offers you access to all of the teaching and learning activities, assignments, notes, references, tools etc. in each subject. Teachers can use the setting section to organize the subject content, assignments, and check in with the data base. It offers you everything you need to know about the sujects, without all the clutter.
Review
Here users are able to review their assignments, their feedback, and their learning – it all builds up to create a system that learns with you, and helps you understand and manage.
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Chapter
User testing
3.5
Initial paper Model
Initial design During our workshops with the school and its students and teachers we employed various research techniques, mentioned above. We visited the school twice, but this first time we were focused on discovering issues of usability and necessary features to help enable a more natural experience. A complete paper-prototype was used to demonstrate the functions of the platform, and further surveys, mood boards, activity maps, and more were used to elaborate or upend previous assumptions.
Revised design After user testing came the important and difficult task of stripping away unneeded functions, tweaking aspects for usability, and figuring out a color scheme and design that would translate our needs into a compelling e-Learning platform.
Revised42paper Model
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Chapter
Second User testing
3.6
Taking the models and other details to be worked out back to the school we were able to get more feedback from students and teachers. Finally we found that we really had to emphasize ways to communicate and review most of all. Better communication improves learning and management by making everything else more efficient. Teachers need to spend less time on the busy work, and more time on what matters; and students hope to understand the material better and communicate more openly with their classmates. ‘Yodel’ needed to connect them to what matters. Through this testing we were able to clarify more details, and deliver solid designs based on those needs.
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Chapter 4
Yodel
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Chapter
Objective/ Problem
4.1
Objective
Yodel is a comprehensive learning experience using collaborative communication to enhance both learning and management for students and teachers.
Problem
Nowadays, students are struggling in a school system that emphasizes test taking, rather than understanding. If they do not understand, they often do not speak up, and the work on their own and in groups suffers, because of this poor communication. Teachers, on the other hand, are stretched thin dealing with a variety of responsibilities that require time and coordination. Yodel works to solve these problems by providing a comprehensive learning experience using collaborative communication to enhance both learning and management for students and teachers.
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Chapter
4.2
Information Architecture
4.2 Subject Connect Review Teacher only
To help support usability we wanted to provide a platform that could be easily understood. This diagram demonstrates the organization of YODEL and how all the various functions and features are supported and connected through the three main topics: subject, connect, review.
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Chapter
4.3
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4.3
YODEL’s interface lets you work the way you want to work by allowing you to manage through activities, rather than features.
Key interface
Login page
Subject Tab
Main page
Connect Tab 53
Chapter
Users scenario Scenario 1
4.4
Assignment
Teachers
Share/Collaboration
Student
Students
• Student do homework • Students collaboration
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4.4
4.4
• Select the ‘to-do’ icon to see upcoming assignments • Choose the unfinished assignment you would like to work on
• Jump to particular excercise and fill in the answers
• Chat with classmates about the assignments problems and work out solutions together
• Feeling shy? Switch news feed to ‘Anonymous’ to post a question without being put in the spotlight • Drag and drop a problem question into the newsfeed to post to the class
• Use Connect Tab to ask for help • Rollover classmates photos to see relevant information about what they are working on, and their status
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• Responses to the question show up on the public news board
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4.4
4.4 Scenario 2 • The teacher’s homepage uses a similar interface, but has some exclusive functions
• For example, the Teacher has a ‘setting’ button on the subject tab. Here they can manage all the assignments, submissions, and other related information Submission Feedback
Teacher
Students
• Choose English in the subject section to see more information
• Teacher check students submission • See the auto grade • Feedback to Students
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4.4
4.4 Scenario 3 • Here all the related files for the English subject can be found • Click on the submission folder
• Submitted assignments have a star label placed next to them • From here you can check the grade results from online submissions Teachers
Share/Collaboration
• Give feedback to a particular student if necessary
Assignment
Teacher
Students
• Teacher Collaboration • Assign to Students
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4.4
4.4
• Choose ’e-Notice’ from the Adminstration section
• Jump to the mail page, the Connect tab will slide out • Sort recipients by class, staff, or other group settings.
• All relevant e-Notice’s will be displayed and can be sorted
• Drag and drop the class into the “To” box to send
• Search for parent authorization form to send to contacts
• Update the content • Save and send
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• An icon appears on ‘new mail’ when a message is recieved
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Chapter 5
Conclusion
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Chapter
Chapter
5.1
5.2
Conclusion
Reflections
Mark Bowers Yodel offers a unique experience for students and teachers where they can connect to one another and the subject matter on a larger scale. Learning is no longer relegated to the classroom, but instead should be fostered at home and abroad. The tools needed to support this are available in Yodel; it understands that the key aspects to a productive teacher and student are collaboration, communication, management and responsibility, and the ability to review. We wanted to provide a easy to use, yet still complex, system that could engage users and provide the best possible learning environment to support classroom activities and learning, and we believe Yodel accomplishes that.
Throughout this four-month project we have challenged ourselves with creating the best possible learning management platform for our stakeholders. The process has allowed us to research a variety of topics and we have met our fair share of success, as well as trouble, when we come up against them. Struggling at first to contact the schools and organize meaningful research sessions, we were worried about the outcome of the final project. Finally, it was worked out and we had an engaging and insightful session with the students and teachers that really helped support the importance of research. Following the research, the real difficulty was synthesizing our research into actionable insights that could be used to build relevant design features and experiences. Working in a group of three proved at times to be very helpful when we had to work through lots of material, but also was a hindrance when there was not enough work to go around. Initially establishing roles and taking advantage of each other’s strengths would have helped expedite the process, but of course we wanted to try new things and challenge ourselves, so it was hard to find a balance. The success of this project comes from all of our hard work, and being able to move past any of our shortcomings when pressured with limited time, to develop a product that we were all happy with. Overall, it was a very engaging and rewarding experience in the time we were provided, but communication and design roles may have benefited us in defining the project goals and scope.
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5.2
5.2
Brian, Chan Shek Chuen
Liu Yaming
This is the first design workshop of the programme, it also is my first interaction design experiences. It let me experienced the whole interaction design process, it actually quite different than my design profession. During the project, we have spent more than 70% of time on research and user testing. This design experience has been very impressed to me. I actually got everything that I need from research, no matter problem identification, problem solving and even the design solution, they all came from research. The whole process has also taught me about the basic concept and methodology of interaction design practically.
This workshop is worked for ASTRI and also the first project in the whole studying. The whole process of this project was fundamentally, from primary research to final design we took the process seriously. In the early two months, most of time and effort we put into the research, which made us define the problems well. We visited the school repeatedly and took a variety of research methods and interviewed the family to understand the teachers, parents and students how to communicate. Our objective is using Yodel to enhance collaboration, communication and management.
In these four months, we have to design an E-learning and management platform for primary school. The process has required us to research on different stakeholder for variety of topics. At the beginning we have many problems to connect with our research user. Due to the communication problem with ASTRI, we struggled at get connect with school and almost wasted a month. And because I am the only Cantonese speaker in the team, I have to find another way to do the primary research. Before we got connect with school, we only could base on my research sources to develop the user profiles. Once we have connected with school, the research process run smoothly. However anther difficulty is how to analyze the research finding, and transfer those insights to design objection.
In this course, the first challenge is how to find useful insights from our research for at that time we hadn’t had the related experience we studied from Research and Analysis class, Design and Value Creation class or INPD class. The biggest challenge to me was difficult to communicate in different languages. But it was also the advantage for our three students who came from different regions to cooperate. We learned a lot from each other, we all contributed our own strength to this project so that it was precious experience.
As I worked with 2 teammates, this is quite helpful. Because of our different background we could always came up many different perspectives. We always wanted to find out the best solution, but due to the limited of time, the execution still has a lot to be improved. Anyway, this design experience is engaging and valuable. The research process have changed my design perspectives a lot.
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Chapter
Special thanks & Sponsor
5.3
Sponsor by
Hong Kong Applied Science and Technology Research Institute (ASTRI)
Special thanks
Po Leung Kuk Chee Jing Yin Primary School
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Brian Chan Shek Chuen (10625289G) Liu Yaming (10533684G) Mark Bowers (10546968G) MDes Interaction Design 2010-2011 School of Design
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