Learner Experience Design

I’m currently taking a class with Dr. Stacie Rohrbach around how to design experiences that engage people in educational activities that enhance their learning through meaningful, memorable, and enjoyable interactions with information.

As part of the course, I will be documenting post-class activities and reflections.

01.16.18 | Post-Class Reflections

As part of the class kickoff, we conducted two activities.

1. Fill in the Grid

The first activity was an ice breaker where students had to complete a grid with information about other students in the class. As part of the instructions, we were only allowed to phrase the information in each of the grid’s quadrant as a “yes” or “no” question and could only ask one question to a person. The person who first completed the grid with other student names won a prize. After a hectic 15 minutes, the professor used the debrief of the activity to highlight the main learning objectives of the course.

Insights and Ah-Has:

• Let your learners experience the learning objectives instead of telling them: by playing this game our chances of remembering the learning objectives of the course increased. As the debrief highlighted, as part of this course we will explore questions such as who are your learners? What are their goals? How do you motivate them? What skills and knowledge do they need? What is the context of the learning experience?
• The first class activity impacts the mood of the classroom: by playing this icebreaker, the mood of the room changed from an “awkward first day of class” feeling to a more relax environment that invited people to speak up and share their opinions and views.

2. Kahoot Jeopardy Game

The second activity that we conducted was playing a Jeopardy type of game that tested our knowledge of user experience and design. For this activity, we paired up with another classmate and competed to answer different questions under 30 seconds. This activity was also a competition where the scores of the top 5 teams (out of 10) were displayed after each question. The mood of the class remained positive as different teams celebrated answers that were right or lamented wrong answers.

Insights and Ah-Has:

• Think about the right tech to use when designing a learning experience: the kaboot platform was well designed and provided the right environment (e.g., visuals, music, prompts) to motivate the learners to test their knowledge.
• When designing a learning experience, understand the levers that you can leverage: in this activity, students had 30 seconds to respond to a question. Moreover, if they were the first to provide a correct answer, they got extra points. If they were first but answered the question incorrectly, points were deducted from their total score. The platform appropriately leveraged these levers to motivate and energize its learners.
• Improve learners skills and knowledge via collaboration: As James Surowiecki highlights in his book, The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies and Nations, students indicated that, as pairs, they felt more confident in their answers than if we had played this game as individuals. By being in pairs, we not only learned from each other by also were able to win more points.

Overall this first class emphasized how gamifying a learning experience can be a great tool to help increase student engagement and subject retention.

01.18.18 | Carnegie Mellon Natural History Post Tour Reflections

Today we met the education team of the Carnegie Mellon Natural History Museum. As part of our class project, we are going to be helping them create a learning experience around what it means to be a 21 Century Naturalist.

As part of the visit, the team introduced us to the concept of the 21 Century Naturalist through an activity. Each person received a set of cards that they had to sort around two buckets. In the first bucket we were asked to put the cards that we personally thought a 21 Century Naturalist was most likely to do. Whereas, in the second bucket we had to place cards that we thought a 21 Century Naturalist was least likely to do. After everyone completed sorting their cards, some people shared their top characteristics. It was very interesting to see the different responses and explanation for their choices.

Sample of the sorting cards

I think that this was a great activity to help everyone reflect on a topic that is not familiar to most people or seems ambiguous. It reminded me of an activity that we conducted in one of our workshop around Diversity and Inclusion were people had to sort cards about what D&I meant to them. The activity was very powerful in elevating the discussion and helping people understand that there was not one common D&I definition. In this case, we realized that the definition of a 21 Century Naturalist was very different for everyone and that understanding these differences in definition is going to be key for our project.

The team also introduced us to another framework that they created to support their definition of the skills that are needed for a 21 Century Naturalist. This reminded me of a skills or competency model that at Deloitte we used to develop for the HR division of clients. Laurie Giarratani, the director of education, mentioned that they are using it to assess and further develop their educational programs. I am looking forward to readings more about the framework and seeing it in action at the museum.

Finally, we also had the opportunity to tour one of the current exhibitions called “We are Nature — Living in the Anthropocene”. I unfortunately had to run to another class but I am looking forward to exploring the museum and exhibition this coming weekend.

01.22.18 | Readings Reflections: Conceptual Blockbusting by James Adam

Chapter two of James Adam’s book Conceptual blockbusting presents a couple of great concepts that every designer should keep in mind. My keys takeaways from this reading were:

• Beware of perceptual stereotyping in areas that do not interest you. Adams discussed how perceptual stereotyping has helped humans make sense of the world by helping them decode all of the information that we receive and then process key information. He raises a good point that this habit can have a negative effect on things that we find non-important or uninteresting which can strongly impact and bias our perception. When designing learning experiences, we should ask ourselves if there are any negative perceptual stereotyping that learners have for a particular subject and if our design intervention mitigates, neutralizes or enhances those stereotypes.
• Active listening is hard but important. Adam proposes an activity to help people break their perceptual stereotypes and learn from people. They have to find another person they don’t know and assign an initial label. They then have to spend five minutes exchanging additional characteristics about themselves to the other person. Once the five minutes are up, it’s the other person’s turn to share characteristics of themselves. He points that this is hard and that most people want to engage in small talk or are thinking about their own list instead of actively listen to the second person. In this post, Qin Tang provides an overview of the 12 blocks of active listening. For me, being aware of these blocks has helped me become a better listener.
• What problem are you really trying to solve? This is one of the best lessons I learned while working at Deloitte. One of our partner always encouraged us to think about this question instead of trying to please our client with any request. It takes courage to confront your client and helped them see that sometimes they have asked you to solve a symptom rather then the real problem. Living with the problem can help you develop the right challenge statement and enable you to successfully communicate it to your stakeholders. Problem framing is a skill that designers and problems solvers should work constantly on.
• Don’t just accept constraints, question them. The nine dot challenge is a great way to push people to think about what are their constraints and how they can break them. I feel that we don’t spend a lot of time questioning constraints. We often take them for granted and move along to solve a problem or do our thing. Questioning problem constraints should be also part of living with the problem.

This is another great mental model activity that I recently encountered:

From: Business model You by Tim Clark, Alexander Osterwalder and Yves Pigneur

• Just because you see it often does not mean that you remember it. Adams discusses that we have saturated our senses and that being exposed to something often does not mean that we will remember it. This post highlights how people cannot accurately draw the logo of many iconic brands that they see everyday. As we design a learning experience, we should be aware of this situation and understand how it impact the experience we are designing.
• When designing, use all your sensory inputs! I think that this is one of the most powerful recommendations that Adams makes. While designing Greenhouse experiences, we always kept the participants senses in mind and designed activities that not only required their thinking but also engaged one or more of their senses. One of my favorite activities to change participants perceptions was the miracle fruit. We would display lemons and ask participants to taste them. They would taste sour. We would then give them this fruit and then ask them to taste another lemon. After the fruit, the lemon would taste sweet. We used this experience to drive the point that teams and leaders have the ability to change situations from challenging ones to ones were creativity and innovation can flourish.

Creativity has sometimes been called the combining of seemingly disparate parts into a functioning and useful whole. — James Adam

01.23.18 | Post-Class Reflections

Today we conducted a number of activities to introduce some of the key concepts from James Adam’s book around Conceptual Blockbusting. From this activities, I had two takeaways:

• A new activity to help limit the problem space: We were asked to highlight the three most important components of a toaster and then redesign it without them. This helped our team think outside the constraints and look for new ways to achieve the outcome of a toaster: to toast bread. This is a design activity that I was not aware of and I am looking forward to using it in my upcoming design challenges

Output of our Toaster redesign activity

• When thinking about a problem, think about ALL of the stakeholders. Taking multiple points of view when solving a design problem is important and helps with divergent thinking. As we design learning experiences for the CMNH, it will be important to identify and determine each stakeholder needs and wants as well as their pain points. This holistic point of view will help us develop an encompassing experience.

01.25.18 | Post-Class Reflection

As part of today’s class, we finished discussing the key takeaways from James Adam’s book. We also applied them to one of our learning experience challenges for the Carnegie Museum of Natural History. As a team, we started to unpack the challenge of building connections with people that do not typically go to the museum. From this activity, I gathered the following key insights:

• Think about saturation in the context of a museum: as we think back to the exhibit, we should think about what parts blended with our environment and which parts caught our attention the first time. This is a lever that as designers we can manipulate while creating an experience
• Change the scale of your problem. In order to better understand the design challenge, our professor encouraged us to to change the scale of our problem. Think about it through a change in content, audience and context. This helped us expand our thinking and look at the problem through different lenses
• What are the 3 most important things of the solution, then remove them and think about what else could solve the problem. This is a very powerful technique that helped our team come up with alternative solutions to solve the problem. The ideas that we generated could be good sources of inspiration for future work

01.30.18 | Post-Class Reflections

Today we conducted a number of activities to introduce some of the key concepts from Julie Dirksen’s book around designing for how people learn and Bernice McCarty’s theory of 4MAT system. Key takeaways from the class include:

• Learners learn better for multi-modal interventions. As a class we discussed learning preferences and how they are more of a myth than a science. Several of my classmates indicated that when interventions use multiple senses to engage with learners, they have a higher likelihood of remembering the content that was presented to them. At Deloitte, while designing our experience workshop we applied a multi-sensory experience to encourage people to retain information in different ways
• Leverage the 4MAT system as a tool to design learning experiences.

4MAT System

When designing a learning experience, we need to understand our learners and see how they fit with this framework as well as how quickly do we want to walk them through it.

the framework has four quadrants:

1. the Why? quadrant is about purpose. Learners in this category want to understand the big picture
2. the What? quadrant is about conceptualizing the content. Learners in this quadrant enjoy doing research
3. the How? quadrant is about problem solving and understanding how the concepts that learners are learning work
4. the If? quadrant pushes learners to transform the content that they learned and ask themselves what if questions

• Think and design in cycles. As we design learning experience, we can take a look at the our materials and determine how many cycles we want to drive people through and what content should be developed in each cycle. This is a good insight in terms of breaking the learning apart and tailoring some of the experiences to different type of learners
• Determine the level of your ramp. In a class you may have people at different levels. When designing learning experiences, we need to understand how many are notice and how many already have experience with the topic. From there each person might have a different ramp up curse. As designers we need to understand our learners in order to design a challenging yet not discouraging ramp.

02.01.18 | Post-Class Reflections

Today we had the opportunity to select our team members for the class challenge. We conducted a couple of activities that started to help us to define the scope of the learning. We worked as a team to complete a poster that encouraged us to think about the following features of the problem:

• What are the objectives of the challenge?
• What are some problems with the challenge?
• Who are the stakeholders/learners impacted?
• For our top 3, what are their hopes and aspirations? What are their fears?

As we navigated these questions we had a opportunity to not only dive deeper into the the problem but also understand the problem from different angles. Our professor mentioned that we will be doing this sort of convergent and divergent thinking throughout the course which I find challenging but also exciting. I particularly enjoyed that the template that we used could we reused to explore different problems that we identified. As a team we will have the opportunity to put that challenge in the middle and see what aspirations and hopes they bring in our learners.

The second takeaway from today’s class was to start to think about the points of synergy between our learners and the points of opposition. As we design and take our learners toward the learning journey, focusing on the points of synergy will help us design experiences that will be well received by our stakeholders.

Finally, as we start to better understand our learners, we will have to think about how might we leverage the 4MAT system when we are designing our learning experiences.

02.04.18 | Readings Reflections Dirksen Chapter 3

In Chapter 3 of Dirksen’s book about designing for how people learn, she introduces the idea of defining the goal of the learning experience. She uses a good metaphor to help us understand that when we are designing a journey, we need to understand the destination but also how we plan to get there. We need to understand the problem that our experience is trying to solve. She encourage us to think about what can the learners do vs. what they will know. Focusing on the doing makes its more tangible not only for the learners but also for the experience designers.

Dirksen also introduces the idea of playing with the level of sophistication of a learner and the proficiency that the learner needs to have. I think that this framework is an interesting one to keep in mind when looking at the problem and objectives that our learning experience is trying to solve.

Communicating the learning objectives of a learning experience is important as it helps guide and anchor your learner in the learning journey. I really enjoyed learning more about the different types of learning objectives. As a reflect on some of the trainings that I developed while at work, I can see how I have fallen victim of trying to pack as many learning objectives types into one sentence or PowerPoint slide. Her recommendation of being more purposeful on the types of learning objectives that we put in front of our learners as well as how they are phrased and presented is something that I will incorporate in my future work.

What is the pace layering of learners? What can change quickly? What can change slowly?

These are great questions to understand the type of skills that your are trying to mold within your learning experience. We should use quick and easy interventions such a checklist for quick changes or skills development (e.g., learn to develop a communication plan). For skills that require a slower transition (e.g., learn to negotiate contracts), our learning interventions should help the learners develop these skills over time. Finally, taking into consideration the foundation of a learner (e,g., their culture and personality traits) is important to understand as it can impact how they internalize the learnings from the experience. As designers we need to be aware of them and its effects on the experiences that we create.

02.06.18 | Post-Class Reflections

The objective of today’s class was to further define the problem that CMNH provided us as well as understand potential opportunities that we would like to further explore. During our first activity, we revisited our problem and started to ask a series of questions to further understand the problem. For each of the problems that we identified last week, as a group we asked two questions: Why is this a problem? What could happen because of this problem? Diving deeper into each problem enabled us to start to identify a hierarchy within our problems. This is helping us gain a better understanding of potential opportunities that we might want to solve for with our learning experience design.

Sample of in progress brainstorming of root causes for the current state

The second activity helped us think about the root cause of problems. We used another template to think about the current state of a particular scenario and started to fill it with ideas around what could be the root cause for the current state based on different viewpoints (e.,g from knowledge perspective, from the environment perspective, from the communication perspective). This activity is helping us to further understand the problem through different lenses and start to identify potential focus areas for our learning experiences prototypes(e.g., focus on improving the motivation of learners vs improving their skills levels).

02.08.18 | Post-Class Reflections

Today we continued to explore the CMNH challenge and focused at defining the preferred state of our challenge through different focus areas (e,g,. Knowledge, skills, motivation, environment and communication). We were encouraged to explore the different problem and think about what if they were gone. As we characterized the preferred state, it was easier to define it by completing the end of following sentence: this is preferred state because…. Using this framing helped our team become more comfortable with the ambiguity of the process.

Our professor also introduced us to a couple of news ideas and frameworks:

• Think about circles when developing learning objectives. The picture below provides an overview of how we can position ideas and start to build a hierarchy of learning and outcomes

• Remember the pace of learning. As we think about the knowledge and skills that our learners will learn throughout the learning experience, we should think about categorizing them under fast paced skills (they are typically the ones that get a lot of attention) and slow paced skills (they are the powerful since they enable learners to internalize the information). This affinity grouping will help us further focus on our experience design
• Think about how to leverage prior knowledge. This can help us think about how to leverage the motivation and skills of our learners. Understanding how they move from one category to another, from activating the knowledge to addressing misconceptions of the topics, will be also beneficial to helping us narrow down our focus
• Bloom’s taxonomy can be a new tool to leverage. We also got introduced to Bloom’s taxonomy which can be another useful framework to help us think about how to further slice and organize the knowledge of our learners as well as the experience that we create for them.

As a next step, we will develop hypothesis to bridge the gap between the current and preferred state.

01.22.18 | Readings Reflections: Chapter 3 — What factors motivate students to learn? by Susan Ambrose

Chapter 3 of Ambrose’s book provides an overview of motivation and strategies that designers can use to improve their learning experiences. My key takeaways from this reading were:

• Understand the different types of value that learners have and how they can influence the learning experience. Prior to this reading, I was familiar with intrinsic and extrinsic motivation. I found interesting to find a new type of value: attainment. This is one that I think gets easily confused with intrinsic motivation. Understanding how these three types of value can work together can potentially elevate the learning experience that we design
• The environment influences motivation. As we create our learning experience, we need to think about how the design of the environment impacts our learner’s motivation. We can potentially leverage their senses and enrich the learning experience to not only influence their motivation but also encourage their grasp of the subject being taught
• Students are more motivated when you make the content real. This is one of the biggest challenges that we have in our CMNH project as students have trouble understanding how the can be a 21 century naturalist outside of the museum and classroom setting. As we learn move about the topic, we should look for example that bring it to life
• Help students understand what success and failure look like. This insight from Ambrose reminds me of the growth mindset from Carol Dweck book. Educators have a great responsibility to help student understand what success and failure look like and help them see how they can further learn from those experiences. I feel that these experience shape their future recilience to failure.

01.16.18 | Post-Class Reflections

Today in class we discussed the topic of motivation. Our professor introduced a couple of frameworks that can help us think beyond the typical concept of intrinsic and extrinsic motivation. In order to do so, we played the musical chairs game. As we debriefed how the game unfolded, she introduced us to the magic circle and the notion that play can be a powerful tool when designing a learner experience. At the periphery of the magic circle, you find play which is a mix of some rules that exist inside the circle and the experience that you bring with you (an open system since everyone has a different experience). I really liked the concept as it helps you understand how building a starting structured coupled with a mix of perspectives can help create an experience that supports the learners engagement.

Another point that another student brought was around playing a finite game or an infinite game. On the latter, how do you motivate your learner to continue to play? How to you re-engage with them to help them re-enter the circle so they can experience the play and have another rich experience. As we design our leaner experience, this is something that we should keep in mind for our challenge.

During the second half of our class, we spend some time applying these frameworks as well as Ambrose’s motivation takeaways to our challenge. As we looked at a current problem and the gap that we are proposing, we took a step back and tried to think about how motivation might play a role there. We started to explore the learning objective of helping our learners create and explain taxonomies. We we looked at the different levers of motivation, we identified that building a choice your own adventure type of intervention would enable us to create a sense of play. This is an idea that we will continue to explore in the future.

02.15.18 | Post-Class Reflections

During today’s class, we discussed the importance of not only attracting the attention of our learners but also maintaining it. We also further unpacked Dirksen’s chapter five takeaways around attention. In the chapter, the author introduces the metaphor of the elephant and the rider. The rider is our rational side that is riding on top of an elephant which represent our emotions and instincts. From a learning perspective we need to make sure that we appeal to the elephant in order to keep our learners engaged as the riders cannot always control their elephants’ attention.

Below are some strategies that we discussed in class:

• Leverage surprise. As we design our learning experience it will be important to understand how can we leverage the natural curiosity of kids to engage them.
• Tell stories. Storytelling is powerful technique that can attract and maintain the attention of our learners.
• Think about cognitive load distribution to improve learners memories. When designing learning experiences, we often think about using language and visuals. There could be an opportunity to distribute the cognitive load of our learners and leverage their other senses to understand the topics that we present to them.
• Use social proofing to engage learners. Competition is the first example that comes to our minds when we think about social proofing. I like how today, we were encouraged to think about how social proofing than be driven by collaboration. Collaboration can be another tool that we can use to encourage connections between topics but also between students.

02.19.18 | Readings Reflections: Chapter 2 — How Does the Way Students Organize Knowledge Affect Their Learning by Susan Ambrose

In chapter 2 of Ambrose’s book about how learning works, she introduces us to the idea of how novice and experts build their knowledge. She highlights that knowledge can be organized sparsely or can be richly connected. This way of organizing knowledge can impact how learning is remembered. It can be remembered in a superfluous manner or in a meaningful one.

Key takeaways from the reading include:

• How you organize knowledge and content will impact how learners remember it. For our CMNH project we will need to understand how the current knowledge of the camps are organized and how campers build their learning of the Anthropocene
• Leverage design activities to help visualize learners knowledge. Concept maps and card sorting activities are good ways to understand the mental models and organizational knowledge architecture of learners
• Share the organizational structure of a course can increase the chances that learners internalize the lessons learnings
• Compare and contrast cases can help learners understand how knowledge can be organized. These contrast create a deeper knowledge and more refined knowledge structures

02.20.18 | Post-Class Reflections

During today’s class we further explored how our learners in our CMNH experience might remember it. In order to activate the readings takeaways, we conducted an activity where we had to define an objective: helping nature flourish in urban setting? and develop an experience around it.

cognitive framework

In order to unpack this learning objective, we looked a matrix of knowledge and how someone can go from an notice to an expert.

Moving through the competence / unconsciousness framework

We then explored how a learner would organize the knowledge around our learning concept. As a team, we explored how we could potentially build different mental models (using sequence, using the latch principle) and how we could leverage the existing knowledge that learners have built to date (e.g., learning from a science fair, learning from being a girl or boy scout, etc.). Understanding how our learners could remember and leverage past experiences, helped us think about different ways to encode the learnings so they move to long term memory.

Encouraging participation was another topic that our team discussed. We acknowledged that we could build a great learning experience but if we did not design ways to engage or ask our learners to participate in them, these experiences would fall flat. As we continue to refine our opportunity statement, we will continue to keep the learnings from this activity in mind.

02.27.18 | Post-Class Reflections

Today we discussed how to design for knowledge acquisition. In order to understand the different ways that learners can acquire knowledge, we discussed the Wiggins+McTighe reading where the authors introduce the six facets of learning:

• Explain — when learners demonstrate that they can explain the concept and pick up evidence to support it
• Interpret — when learners can create narratives that help connect their mental models together.
• Apply — when learners use the knowledge in a new context (similar to the What If? 4Mat quadrant)
• Perspective — when learners are able to develop their own opinion and look at different stakeholder perspectives
• Empathize — when learners are able to immerse themselves in a topic and get a sense of the emotions and feeling that others are experiencing
• Self-Knowledge — When learners are aware of what they know and what they don’t know (similar to the unconscious incompetence matrix)

We conducted an activity where different teams were assigned a facet and they had to brainstorm different learning experiences around that facet. Key takeaways from the discussion included:

• Apply experiences are usually applied to abstract concepts that need a demonstration to help learners understand the concept. They can be organized into two stages. Stage 1 introduces the concept. Stage 2 prompts learners to apply the concept into an activity (learn about how the temperature of a liquid can be manipulated with the use of salt by making ice cream)
• Perspective experiences often feel forced and need strong facilitation (e.g., debate club, role play).
• Empathize experiences are the hardest to develop and typically use storytelling and prompts to encourage immersiveness. They also tap into the learners senses as the experience try to engage the learner fully. We discussed timing as an interesting factor to further explore since it can influence how much learner retain vs just enjoy the experience itself
• Self-Knowledge experiences often require repetition which brings awareness to the act. They often make learners slow down and reflect on their experience. This is a powerful facet as discovering a concept by yourself vs having someone tell you about it will have a stronger impact on how learner’s remember it. I call this Ah-ha moments that spark additional growth, seem magical and don’t happen often

03.01.18 | Post-Class Reflections

During class we reviewed the key takeaways from Ambrose’s chapter 4 and 5 around designing activities for acquiring / building skills. Her segmentation of component skills helped us understand how learners learn about a skill in order to master it. As we start to develop our learner experience for CMNH, it will be important for our team to think about the types of skills that our learners have and the ones that we want them to learn through our experience.

Takeaways from Ambrose Chapter 4

Cycle of Practice and Feedback

We also discussed the cycle of practice and feedback and how they related to our learning objectives. In our team we have talked about the practice that we might want our learners to have but did not consider how they would receive feedback or how they would reflect / observe their practices. As the circle points out, these are important components of the cycle in order to help learners master skills and internalize the learning objectives.

Moreover, this cycles becomes more challenging when the facilitator is not present during the activity. For digital experiences, it could be interesting to leverage machine learning and AI to collect observations and provide feedback to learners on their performance. Observations could also be achieved through personal reflection of actions and journal entries. Given that we will not be in person for the pre and post learning experiences that we are conducting, this is an interesting challenge that we will have to keep in mind.

Another interesting point that we discussed during class was scaffolding skills which means that as learners build a skill they might need more help at the beginning of their mastery journey than at the end. We might need to have more frequent cycles of practice and feedback in order to build a solid foundation of those skills and of that knowledge. Once they are gaining mastery, these supports can diminish. For our project group, we will have to think about where are our learners in this learning curve and how much scaffoldings do they need to support their learning. We will also have to consider the flow of learning and how the activities that we design in our experience challenge their abilities and support their mastery building skills.

Scaffolding and Flow of Learning Concepts

Finally, we spent the last part of the class playing games and analyzing them. We not only experienced them but also analyzed them in order to understand the types of knowledge that they were testing (e.g., discrete, content or extensive). Games have been often used to support building extensive knowledge as player work on their fast but also slow skills. From our class we uncovered that:

• When designing games, we should consider the repercussions of our actions but also the other games into our learning. We can not only learn from these actions but also from the actions of others.
• Timing plays an important role in this learning and the skills that player might acquire during the game
• Slow skills seem to be more transferable than fast skills from one game to the next. We could potentially build multiple rounds of a gain to help learners practice and gain further mastery on certain skills
• Digital games are not able to leverage all of our senses. A digital experience might appear less rich than a physical one as we don’t get to use our tactile sense which provides additional information to our experience. With the rise of Virtual Reality this might change as we might be able to experience similar situations than if we were in the place itself. This might be an interesting area to explore in terms of educational games and future technology.

03.06.18 | Post-Class Reflections

We started today’s class by answering five key questions (who, what, why, when and where) that will help inform the next phase of our learner experience design project. We individually brainstormed these questions as well as the tools that we would like to leverage during the next phase of the project and our motivations. We then shared them with our teammates and were later on mixed with people from different groups.

Answers to my five W questions

In these new groups, we presented our five whys to the group and then had an opportunity to receive feedback on our initial thinking. My group discussion prompted the following food for thoughts:

• Further explore how we can combine observation and problem solving to help evolve the learning of campers
• Be aware of the change of setting post the camp. In the camp, children make friends and are part of a group. After the camp this changes, they are either by themselves or have a new community around them (e.g., family). This change in setting could be a challenge when trying to extend the learning
• We should also consider the role of parents and care givers and explore if we want them to have a role on the post camp experience
• Could we create an online platform to further encourage and extend the conversations that campers are having? We could also leverage such platform to encourage campers to use what they learned in camp to other parts of their lifes
• How can we leverage the energy that gets created at the end of the camp and extended it? Some children don’t want the camp to be over because they made strong connections with the group
• We should explore how the LA museum created an interactive exhibit about microbes. This experience use technology and digital coins to engage its visitors. Moyasimon is a manga that also presents microbes in a friendly lights. These experiences and the storytelling techniques that they use could be a great source of inspiration for our team
• another idea to extend the learning of the camps is to leverage the dioramas in the museum to help children further explore the content of camps and help them practice key 21 century naturalist skills
• A final thought that our team had to to potentially explore the experience of flow in camps and design our post camp experience around that

03.08.18 | Post-Class Reflections

Today we had the opportunity to discuss with other teams our insights from interviewing the CMNH team. We also started to brainstorm potential ideas of “How” our learner experience design interventions would supports our five Whys.

While discussing our “Hows”, we also determined the following design considerations:

• Doing is important for our learner group — they learn the most via active learning
• Connectivity / relationships is a theme that we would like to explore further
• The development of slow skills (e.g., systems thinking)
• We want to elevate (linked learning, continuous learning) and evolve (deepening and broadening) learning → help develop T-shape people
• Changing everyday behavior
• develop place-based learning

We also brainstormed the following Hows:

• Pen pal program to support connectedness
• Activity that connects camps with other organizations
• Digital platform that extends the learning (digital journey or voice recording)
• Digital game that extends and rewards post camp knowledge
• Digital portfolio (archive of activity and community)
• Chatbot that partners with learners and tells them more about nature
• VR that highlights and provides more information about the nature around them

As a next step, for our team will further brainstorm “Hows” and determine which ideas we would like to test during the upcoming speed dating activity.

03.20.18 | Post-Class Reflections

In today’s class, we had the opportunity to reconnect with our team and further flush out our 5 W. We revised our learning objectives and created an overarching statement that highlights the “what” and “why” of our opportunity.

Enable 11–13 years old campers to see themselves as part of nature in order to change their behavior and ensure that there will natural resources, for all to use, far into the future. Our intervention will motivate campers to change something they do because they see tangible benefits in the lives of their loved ones and see the ripple effects.

As a next step, we are planning to meet to review our nine initial ideas for interventions and select 3–4 for Thursday’s speed dating activity.

As a next step, team we are planning to review our ideas