Synthesizing UPMC Children’s Observations

March 27, 2018

On Friday, our group did a site visit at UPMC Children’s hospital to better understand the space our activity might take place in. What we saw was a lot of open space, colorful architectural paneling and existing digital games for young children. The games that were there were either for really young children, like 4–6 or for 6–8 year olds. We also discovered spaces like the family center and library where families could go to read or even participate in a program hosted by the hospital programs staff. Although this visit gave us nice context of the space, it didn’t necessarily help us narrow down our ideas around our learning exercise.

Our focus continues to be around environmental health and how it affects human health. We’ve been talking a lot about the 4MAT model as well as the Magic Circle for how we can teach children about sustainability. On Tuesday, we started to walk through the 4MAT system specifically, and match our learning objectives to that specific model. We brainstormed different subjects that would best convey this idea to children and came up with: Food, animals and air. Knowing the popularity of animal videos on YouTube and social media, we became more interested in how we might be able to make children more empathetic about the environment through animals.