Designing for the student
This series shares reflections on my process working on my capstone design (essentially a master’s thesis project) for the LDT program.
Who am I designing for? I think I’ve been struggling with this because I’ve been coming at this from an educator solution perspective. Is this educator a classroom teacher? A STEM coordinator? A makerspace manager? A Girl Scout group leader?
The answer is maybe all, or maybe none. A classroom teacher is going to be hemmed in by curriculum requirements and lack of class time and resources. The STEM coordinator or makerspace manager may present directly to students but may just work with teachers. The extracurricular group leaders feel like they are working the closest to where I want to be, but they are also usually not trained as educators.
So I’m now switching my focus from the educator to the student. I will presume that there is a someone – a parent, a group leader, or a teacher – who is motivating the activity. It is implemented by the adult with the student, like DIY.org or BrainPop or any of the reading games that students could access at school or at home.
The problem I’m trying to solve is that most students don’t get a chance to experience STEM subjects in an authentic way until late high school. This is both a better way to learn deeply and also help students see these subjects as relevant and creative tools that they can engage with to solve problems and to express themselves with. By bringing authentic and creative experiences to more students, we can help them see themselves as capable of engaging with STEM and give those topics meaning.
The learning outcome that I want for these students is: that they have to believe they are capable because they have evidence of their own creative products; they understand the relevance of STEM because they have connected their work with ideas they care about; they understand how STEM can be applied to invent and express because they have a portfolio that shows this; and they see a path forward to grow their skills because they have linked their work with future study and careers.
For my next prototype, I will sketch out a tool that expresses these ideas and share it with a middle school student and their parent, with the framing that they pretend that this tool was shared with them as part of a class or extracurricular group like scouting.