Engage Week: designing an experience students love

School has been the same way for a long time: lectures, homework, exams, bell schedules. But is that what students really need?

Discover

Research & Development

Being teachers, a lot of discussion, research, and thinking went into the event design. We considered how students enter, find a seat, engage in activities, and walk away with meaningful experiences.

Three competitors (or models) stood out in our Discover phase:

• The Future Design School project based in Toronto, Ontario

• The Learning by Design project at the International School of Brussels

• Research on the future of learning by Ted Dintersmith and Tony Wagner

We used that as ground to build a prototype (or “pilot”) of our learning event.

Prototype Goals

Testing the event at-scale, as a prototype, is an idea I stole from Make Space: How to Set the Stage for Creative Collaboration by Scott Doorley and Scott Witthoft.

Our goals were to:

• experiment with physical spaces

• explore patterns of movement and social organization

• gauge students’ interest in activities

• generate ideas from students about what to improve at the school

In sum, we ran 2 at-scale prototypes of the event with 160 participants, participatory design sessions, and group interviews to (1) test and (2) generate ideas.

Define

Participatory design insights

We aggregated the data from the participatory design sessions in a Google Doc to promote discussion, permanence, and access.

Big idea #1

From this data, we identified three big themes. Students wanted experiences that involved:

• Environmental Stewardship

• Cultural and Social Diversity

• Service Learning

Group interview insights

We pulled our facilitator notes from group interviews and picked three quotes that represented the most biggest, most common ideas.

Big idea #2

Students liked the idea of an event with a focus on choice, “real experiences,” and future-of-work skills —but they needed more time and space to work.

Develop

Objective

We met as a team to write a design brief (aka event charter). Basically, it was “the plan.”

The objective we developed was “to engage students in problem-solving and experiential learning around authentic challenges. Learning is interdisciplinary and will have some communicable outcome.”

Important features

We then wrote the important features of the experience:

• Teacher interest and choice

• Student interest and choice

  • Students define the guiding questions (through advisory work in February)

  • Students choose their top three topics to explore, define, design (these will serve as starting points, but can be modified later on)

• Students will make full use of the resources available at the school - facilities, supplies, technology

• Effective use of the 4Cs: creativity, collaboration, creative thinking, communication

• The focus will be on process, not product. While all work is solutions-focused, the expectation is not necessarily that student work will end in a product of some kind. 

• The experience provides opportunities for further development (projects could turn into solutions presented in the community, student clubs/activities, precursors to CAS, etc.) of the experience

Tentative Schedule

With the our project charter (objective and important features) as anchor points, and our research on other projects, we developed a tentative schedule.

In addition to designing the experience, managing logistics, and branding the event, I also ran mini-workshop sessions. I talked about my work as a User Experience Designer and what that looks like in a variety of contexts—from events to interfaces. Then, I worked with students to see what deliverables made sense for their project. How could they leverage UX?

Deliver

We transformed a week of school from study hall, physics, and history to open-ended explorations of skills, passions, and design thinking. Plus mindfulness, yoga, and snacks. It felt right.

Students leaned heavily on each other for feedback. Facilitators played co-creator roles.

Quotes

Here’s what participants said.