Creating a New Role for Portfolios

Prototype and Refinements

Product Visioning

Gameboard Mapping

We built some visioning gameboards to look at how our product might be able to help students in different scenarios. We explored these scenarios through a couple of different channels including:

• thoughts & feelings
• actions & interactions
• touchpoints & devices
• people & their environment.

Scenario 1: Students are assigned a class assignment and are introduced to a new optional tool. Students are able to generate an auto generated template for presentations.

Mrs. Reid is giving out the latest class project. She tells student a process report is due with the final. Students can use an app to help them create their journey. The project is due and students come in with their journey on their school iPads.

Scenario 2: Students use a reward system that includes earning points to raise a pet through project completion.

Kim gets a notification in her Facebook news feed about one of her friends raising a virtual pet by doing the equivalent of updating her status, by updating her progress on a school project. She is curious and decides to try out the system(our project).

Scenario 3: Students have access to a newsfeed where they can explore other peer projects.

Jane sees that Amanda likes her project on her phone. She checks the newsfeed for others’ projects and comments on other’s work.

Scenario 4: Students have a personal profile where they can see all their project in one place.

Mr. O’Neil teaches an art course, and uses the (project) to let his students have a gallery. The gallery treats each student’s personal gallery like a storybook with each project as a chapter.

Consolidated User Journey Map

From our gameboard sessions, we were able to create a consolidated user journey that we wanted students using our product to take.

Prototyping Sessions

Round 1

For our initial prototype, we interviewed middle school students from Pittsburgh Center for the Arts who were in a digital media class, and showed them paper models of what we would like to happen throughout their interaction with the product. We also demonstrated the paper prototype with the teachers of the children, to get more feedback from a teacher’s perspective.

Key Questions

Goal Setting

• What kinds of goals would you like to set for yourself?

Bite Size Tasks

• What do you think of these tasks?
• Would you use any of them?
• How would you use them?

Peer Feedback

• How do you feel about this feature?
• Do these guidelines help you look at the picture with a different perspective?
• How would you answer some of these questions?

Introduction and Exit Interviews

• How do you feel about doing a selfie interview?
• Can you answer these sample questions about a current project that you’re working on?

Student Feedback

We found that the youngest set of middle schoolers (5th-6th grade) had a hard time concentrating on our explanations and the demonstration of the paper prototype, but the older middle schoolers (7th-8th grade) displayed more interest in prototype. With the level of feedback provided, we had to assume that the attention was simply to be respectful since there was very little constructive feedback given. “That was good,” seemed to be the overall response they would give us.

When asked to set a goal, students were either not sure how to respond, claimed they already had goals set but did/could not articulate them, or did not seem very interested in the idea. We also developed to prototype with the intent of letting students import and export photos to sites like Instagram, but we found that students either did not have a smartphone, did not use social media, or both. They did not stay very organized and rarely ever save the process of their work. They don’t feel the need to look back on their previous work, but would still like to improve on their skills.

Teacher Feedback

Teacher A

Teacher A offered example questions for the students to answer such as, “What inspires you to be creative?” She also asked if questions were really necessary. Do these questions stunt the students’ creativity, or should these prompts be very open ended?

She also pointed out that the feedback will depend highly on how mature a student is. From ages 11–13 are very different in their maturity levels. However, she complemented the critique-like structure we provided. It would allow students to practice providing constructive feedback.

Teacher B

Teacher B suggested that mandatory kinds of feedback might be helpful. It is hard to motivate students to do it on their own but they would probably think it’s cool to look back on a month from now.

Design Implications

Due to the lack of constructive feedback, we decided to move our demographic up to late middle school and high schoolers. Our design is intended to promote a meta-cognitive task, so it is important that we have a demographic that is capable of such a task since we intend to scaffold the documentation process and reflection.

With suggestions by the teachers being an important matter in our design choice, we tried to consider ways teachers can be involved, but we need to see specifically how much they should be involved since we want to consider the student who does not have a teacher or mentor, but still wants to help themselves.

We also tried to keep the emphasis off of the social media, so that the focus could be more on the students’ development of their artifacts. We also don’t want to stifle creativity, so we plan to make a quota of questions to answer instead of making all questions mandatory.

Round 2

We decided to return to Pittsburgh Center for the Arts but attended a different class that had an older age group. We revised our prototype based on feedback from the previous session.

Key Questions

• What are good question guidelines for students?
• Do high schoolers benefit from our platform?
• Do students prefer critique without or with the prompt?
• Do our critique questions make sense to students?

We then developed a digital prototype with guiding questions for the interviews that give the user more choice in the matter.

We also developed a more robust peer critiquing model that allows students to comment simply as well as receive guiding questions.

Session Findings

We found that high schoolers at Pittsburgh Center for the Arts were a more productive and responsive audience. They reported their comfort and discomfort with the decisions we made in the design. We also kept track of the questions students answered, finding that most students prefer to answer these three questions: “What did you learn from this project”, “How well do you believe you did with your project” and “What did you enjoy the most about the project?” Students are not always comfortable when they have to videotape their answers, and students prefer comments without guiding questions.

On the other hand, teachers want to add specific questions for the class, and would like to be more active in the process.

Design Implications

We should continue to target high schoolers for our final product. The scaffolding of documentation processes seems to resonate more with them than with the middle schoolers.

For the interviews, we decided to allow teachers to be able to submit “recommended questions” for their students to answer in their beginning and ending interview. We also decided to make the full set of questions available to the student so that they wouldn’t be surprised with questions they would rather not answer and have to cycle back through the question deck. We will also provide the option to audio record, type, or video record a student’s responses to the interview question.

It was suggested that we remove the mandatory guiding questions for the critique since the students felt they were capable, so it might be in our best interest to keep it as an option instead. There will always be someone who needs the support, so scaffolding may be necessary for some students. We also decided to make the critiques mandatory, since both students and teachers thought that it was a helpful design decision.