An engaging learning experience for K-2 students to learn, empathize with, and normalize talks around people with disabilities.
Changing Perspectives is a NPO dedicated to reshaping societal attitudes towards disability. Their approach centers around influencing future generations at an early age, while their perspectives about the world are still forming. They provide teachers with resources like worksheets, videos, readings, which are typically downloaded and used as teaching aids in classrooms.
Due to the current model of resource distribution, direct student access to materials is limited. While educators have the ability to download and use these materials in class, the opportunity for students to interact directly with any material is often missed.In our conversation with Sam, director of Changing Perspectives, he expressed his vision to build an experience where students can interact and engage directly with the content and learn effectively with better retention. Since it’s in great alignment with our research direction, we partnered with Changing Perspectives and started from there to ideate potential solutions.
Leveraging interactive narratives and experiential tasks, Same Difference offers a dynamic educational platform for K-2 students to deeply engage with and normalize conversations about disability.
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To begin, we conducted competitor analysis to understand the current landscape. We learned that most competitor products have disability education as a subset of broader k-12 courses, and that educators and school districts are their main target audiences, instead of children.
We also talked to industry leaders and disability activists, who pointed out that current offerings often fail to address other key influencers in children’s developing environment outside of the singular teacher-student relationship, like peers and home environments. It’s important to establish a shared language and understanding across these relationships.
Their current curriculum is divided into 3 phases, Learn, Experience and Reflect. We found that the Experience module leans on theory and relies heavily on teachers’ efforts to be engaging and effective. And there is a lack of an accurate impact measurement on the effectiveness of learnings.
To address problems and opportunities discovered in our research, we conceptualized a platform where learning materials are adapted to be story-driven with real life scenarios, while involving peers and parents in activities and hands-on tasks to foster a shared language and understanding. With the addition of impact measurement quizzes immediately, and two weeks after learning.
Since a child’s socio-emotional development closely depends on the efforts and investment of people around them, we also created and executed a few behavioral experiments and interviews to validate/invalidate our key assumptions about their relationship. We narrowed down to a few assumptions with the biggest uncertainty and impact.
We were able to verify most of our assumptions, however we found that teachers often have reduced confidence in teaching as they mainly teach other subjects and don’t receive enough training, it usually falls on them to “figure it out” themselves. Our experiment also found that children need very clear and visually engaging guidance to keep motivated to interact with the material.
In our experiment we found that children perform well in assessment immediately after a learning session, however follow up quiz is key to gauge accurate retention and can help reinforce key learnings. We also added a pre-learning quiz to help assess learnings and growth more accurately.
Immersive learning by engaging in hands-on tasks through storytelling results in better information retention and effective application of it in the real world. Activities are either individual or with peers/adults that establish a dialogue between each stakeholder leading to awareness, common language, and shared understanding.
Strategizing activity response content to facilitate conversations among the peers and not create perception of stark right or wrong. Since kids learn from their interactions and relationships with these mascots, it sets the tone for them to be more empathetic towards those who make mistakes.
By incorporating concrete experiences (individually, with teacher, parent), and then reflecting on the outcome, students engage more regions of their brain and make stronger connections with the material. They are encouraged to analyze how their actions affected the issue, and how their outcome may have varied from other students’.
Having an impact assessment that gives an idea about the real time effectiveness of the curriculum and impact on student’s behavior change would ensure that the program is tweaked to their learning.
The stories are more powerful than you think. They help people of all ages in information retention and make it more relatable to them. Stories build narratives to our understanding of the world and shape our concept of morality and biases hence as a designer, it is our duty to make sure that the stories we put out there are not just one sided and that they are crafted carefully to not create any unintended notions or consequences in behaviors of the people.
When we design products, we assume a lot of different things based on our own experiences and biases. That means that the product would not always give an intended experience to people. As designers, it is our responsibility to keep our biases in check and to test out the assumptions we make so that our designs stand the test of usability and human behaviors.
One of the biggest takeaways I had from this project is that you cannot expect to get straight insights with the same questions for everyone. People are like puzzles that differ with culture, age, context and each of your questions need to be carefully crafted to get insights. The mind of kids works entirely differently compared to the mind of adults and as designers you need to make sure you are extra careful while crafting the interview guides so as to not influence their thoughts in any way rather just get their thoughts instead.
If we had more time, we would’ve tested the final module with kids , parents and teachers to understand gaps and the effectiveness of the content. This will help us tweak the interaction experience to better aid young kids. All modules and activities need to be tested.
Since multiple more modules need to be created for other disabilities, there needs to be a compilation of standardized guidelines for research and experiments to develop activities for each. This will also aid in the handover to or the expansion of the research team.
Once the product is developed, its integration into the regular school curriculum needs to be designed. The dynamics of each dyad need to be observed and initial impact needs to be measured to understand the relationship change it brings and the kind of conversations it initiates among kids.
© 2022 Chico Liu
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