Weeknotes on running an after school Design Club remotely

The club started on 9 February and runs for 6 sessions over Zoom. I’m going to try to keep a diary. [FINAL UPDATE: 23 March]

Filling out the “Think like a designer” worksheet. It felt right to complete activities along with the children.

Background to the club

I’ve already run — or supported — four Design Clubs at West London Free School. It seemed a natural place to approach to ask if they were interested in us running a club remotely. Luckily, they said “yes”!

The after school club is for 12 children, aged 11–13, over 6 weeks. Due to Covid-19, we’re delivering the sessions over Zoom. And children are logging in from home.

We’re not sure what technical restrictions the children might face, so we’ve decided to stick with pen, pencils and paper — to start with, at least.

We’ve created a simplified app design project, mixing worksheets from our current workbook with those from an early iteration. We emailed these 12 worksheets (as a pdf) to parents to print. The school offered to help with printing for any students who couldn’t access a printer.

I’ve never led a remote Design Club before so I asked our amazing volunteer mentor community for help. Not one but four mentors offered to support the club. Big thanks Ewa, Farzana, Kate and Mitesh! 🙏

Week 1 (Session 1 — 9 Feb)

Reflections on first week

• We covered worksheets 1–3 in the Design an App — short project.
• I intro’ed the session and first activity, “Fill in your cover sheet”. Mitesh talked through “Understand the design process” and Kate covered “Think like a designer”.
• All of us mentors were very pleased with how it all went. Not too many hiccups. Felt the time flashed by really quickly.
• Only one child didn’t show up at all (out of 12); one came very late and one was late and chose to observe rather than participate (according to his mum, who sent a text message).
• All children responded to questions when asked. They stayed till end. Seemed engaged.
• Good to see at least a couple of children had cameras on, and at least one other tried. There seemed to be an issue with his camera — very dark.
• Not sure why other kids don’t have camera on — maybe shy or maybe lack of bandwidth. They’re not allowed cameras on in class so it’s not a habit.
• Chat worked well as an additional channel. One child was able to vent (repeatedly) about another’s audio being crackly. Ewa and Farzana did a fabulous job responding quickly to comments and questions.
• Nice kids feel they can share their frustrations!

Warm up activities

• Children seemed to enjoy the round robin intros at the beginning.
• We definitely need a warm up for next session.
• Agreed to do a team “check in” that kids can join.
• Everyone likes Ewa’s jar idea.
• Kate’s kids (at primary school) do “rock, paper, scissors” — with kitchen cutlery. Also: Fruit machine — grab a piece of fruit and hold it to camera — try to get a line?
• Any other ideas?
• Not sure about visual stuff if some cameras don’t work properly — test?

Sharing work

• Holding up to camera not ideal as video quality not all good.
• Can ask parents to email photos of work after session. Then review at start of following session.
• Possibility of using Google Forms or Miro or Google Jamboard (Kate’s suggestion)?
• Jamboard is good. I like it. Just not sure if we should go with design industry standard (Miro).
• Which one of these should we use? Ideally to introduce for empathy or ideate session.
• We’ll discuss in more detail next week.

Week 2 (No club — half term)

What happened

• It was nice to have break this week. Time to catch our breath and reflect a little after the first session.
• As it’s half term, Kate ran a Design Club project at home with her two children (6 and 8) to get a feel for the materials. They seem to have really enjoyed it. Kate said her son raced through the process, designing and prototyping his app really quickly. Her daughter wanted to take more time with the empathy and ideation stages.

Kate’s children working through a Design Club project at home this week

• We’ve agreed to hold planning calls 6pm every Thursday. That’s the only time all five mentors can do. The Design Club runs 4pm on Tuesdays so it gives us a couple of days to reflect, and do extra tweaking over the weekend if necessary. I set up this Google planner (a week by week course outline) for us to plan.
• At Design Club, we don’t really like the idea of “training” as such. We prefer the idea of learning by doing. Apart from me, none of the mentors have led an after school club before. This is the perfect opportunity for some hands-on experience. We agreed that each mentor will lead a session. Luckily, each of us has a different skillset. It didn’t take long to see who’d be right for each session. Next week we’ll be defining a challenge — and Kate will lead.
• Even though this week is half term, we still ran the planning call on Thursday. We felt we could use the extra time :)

Thoughts on planning

• We hoped to spend last week’s planning call designing Kate’s session and this week’s call looking more at the rest of the course. But in the end we spent both calls talking about next week. Goes to show that planning can be as long as a piece of string. It always takes up however much time you have available. And can be as complex and detailed as you want it to be! Having said that, time spent planning is NEVER time wasted.

GIF of ginger and white striped cat turning pages of a book on military strategy

• I remember there‘s a famous military quote around the usefulness of time spent in “reconnaissance”. I looked it up. Turns out no-one else seems to know who said it either.

Week 3 (Session 2 — 23 Feb)

What happened

• Kate did brilliantly this week. I introduced the session, asked everyone to check in, then handed over to Kate.
• The aim of this session was to define a challenge. We covered worksheets 4–6 in the Design an App — short project. This is exciting as we’re introducing our new, more diverse, People and new environment and lockdown-friendly Challenges!
• One parent kindly took some photos of his two boys joining the club via Zoom and doodling while listening :)

Two of our students at home, following the Design Club session on Zoom

• To get everyone inspired, Kate shared examples of projects she’d worked on at companies like IDEO, Deliveroo and Tesco. The one the children really loved was a photo of a researcher sitting under a table to get a feel for how toddlers see the world (this helped IKEA develop a smart storage/ tidy-up product for children).
• Kate asked children to choose a person to design for, and a challenge. Last week, she told us she’d discovered the “stamp” feature on Zoom. (And we found out Zoom also has an interactive whiteboard — who knew)?! We decided to experiment with stamps as a voting tool.

Deciding on the challenge

• It took a while for all the children to find the stamp feature, but the stamps worked ok. As a test, we asked them to use stars and hearts to identify which person they’d chosen on screen. A couple of children couldn’t find the feature, so they let us know their choices via the chat, and a mentor added the stamp for them.
• Usually for the first project of an after school Design Club, we let everyone choose whichever person they like the look of, then vote on one challenge to do between them. It’s easier to focus on just one challenge when everyone’s learning. But sometimes this ends in tears, especially when younger kids don’t get the challenge they’d set their hearts on!
• Luckily our Year 7 and 8s students took voting for a challenge in their stride. We did two rounds. In the first round, “Stay positive” and “Explore new places” came out as clear front-runners. In the second, “Stay positive” won by a squeak.
• It’s so interesting the children choose “Stay positive”. Mental health has been such a big concern during Covid, especially for children. I’m really glad we’ll be focusing on that challenge. I think the other mentors are too. It’ll be a great one to explore.

After the session

• As usual, us co-mentors stuck around for 10 minutes after the Club finished for a quick review. After the slightly chaotic voting with stamps experience, we’re not sure about how successful Miro might be later on in the course. We’re worried the children won’t be able to participate equally on an interactive Miro board. We decided to stick with pens, pencils and worksheets for now.
• Sharing work is an issue. We tried asking kids to hold up completed worksheets to their cameras but some were very dark and it was hard to see. Farzana had the great idea of setting up a WhatsApp group where parents could share photos of work after the session.
• After the session, I spoke to the clubs co-ordinator. Unfortunately the school aren’t comfortable with the idea of a closed WhatsApp group, but she agreed to email parents asking them to take a photo and email it to me. Luckily she’s ok with parents emailing photos direct. I can save the photos directly to my DropBox. I’m sure I can find a way of saving direct to our worksheets folder in Google Drive (shared with the co-mentors).

Weekly emails to parents

• I’ve decided it’s easiest for me to draft an email each week for the school’s clubs co-ordinator to forward to parents. Obviously I’m getting their email addresses when they email me, but for data protection, it’s easiest to let the school handle general outbound comms. It’s good to be able to tell parents what we’re doing each week, as well as any particular updates, such as this week they’ll need colouring pencils, or extra scrap paper. (See the “parents” tab on the Google planner for the weekly emails we sent from session 3 onwards).
• It was nice to see the worksheets coming in from parents. Most of the children’s parents emailed work in. Unfortunately most of the emails arrived just before the next session! Not surprising as parents probably didn’t have a clue where their child’s completed worksheet was.

We got feedback :)

• A few parents gave us some lovely feedback — it looks like their children are really enjoying the club so far:

“They thought it was great. Huge thanks!”

Another message:

“Leo was very inspired and buzzed from Design Club so thanks. He has some scheme to produce a card game like Exploding Kittens so he says it will help him with his plans.”

Awesome! And here’s another:

Kohei found the last session really interesting. Thank you.

Finally:

Tomasz is definitely enjoying himself! Thank you so much for your brilliant work!! :-)

• It’s SO great to get this positive feedback. On Zoom it’s not at all easy to “read the room”. Especially when most of the children have their cameras turned off.
• Luckily the team from Elsewhen had warned us that children would probably not want to switch on cameras. So we came prepared. Thanks Matt and Bailey!

Back to school

• On Monday we found out that all children would go back to school in two weeks’ time — the week starting 8 March. So, after spending weeks designing our course to run remotely, everything is changing again!

GIF of Monica and Rachel (from Friends) mouthing “No!” and “Oh my God”

Week 4 (Session 3 — 2 Mar)

Remote versus in-class delivery

• I spoke to the clubs co-ordinator and she said our students (Years 7 and 8) wouldn’t be back in school until Friday 12 March. This means the next two weeks of our club will still need to be remote, and it’s fine for us to run the last two sessions remotely if we like. The club can start at 5pm for those weeks, so children have time to get home and grab a snack. Because popular clubs like Bands and Choir will be starting up again, we’ll also be changing to the club to Wednesdays for the last two weeks. Phew! Hopefully the children will stick with us.

New website is up!

• We’ve been prototyping a new way to present projects. Instead of having a general Resource Hub, we’re also listing worksheets chronologically. Design an App — short project can be used as a slide deck, with an instruction tab alongside each worksheet. That way a lead mentor or teacher can share their screen, and toggle between worksheet and instructions to show children what they need to do, and check notes to see if they’ve missed anything. A child or parent can also follow a project more easily at home.
• Although it’s not quite complete, we soft-launched the new Design Club website at the weekend. Now it’s easier for co-mentors to access.

Reflections on the third session

• The aim of this week’s session was to empathise with your user. We focused on one worksheet, “Create a profile of your user” — worksheet 7 in the Design an App — short project.
• This time it was Ewa’s turn to lead. She did brilliantly. Listening carefully the children and responding well. And very positive presentation style.
• Like Kate, Ewa was super-prepared and had made loads of notes in our Google planner. I copied all these over into the “instructions” tab on the new website.
• We had another great session. All the children seemed very engaged and a couple of new ones even turned their cameras on (Unfortunately two of the others decided to switch their camera off)!

Problems

• Ewa asked children to take five minutes to think about a typical Tuesday in the life of their person, using specific questions as prompts. But a lot of children seemed to struggle with the story-telling. As Farzana said in the chat, the hardest thing is to get children to think outside of their perspective. On the positive side, children were expressing their difficulty in the chat, so at least we could respond to their concerns, and encourage them.
• Children were worried they would “get it wrong”. We had to explain there was no “wrong” answer. Especially with imaginary people!
• Children were very hesitant to share. It took a lot of encouragement, and a lot of persuasion to get them to open up.

After the session

• We agreed how sad it is that children’s learned behaviour — during a year of on and off home-school — is to be silent with camera switched off. My daughter told me that at her school they’re instructed to keep their cameras switched off and audio on mute. So that’s being reinforced every day.
• The thing is, we’re 5 adults with 12 children, and we still struggle to manage everyone’s situation and questions! We took a moment to empathise with teachers and imagine how hard it must be one adult online with a class of 30! It’s no wonder children are told to minimise distraction. Just such a shame. We agreed this is a crazy state of affairs. Collaboration is so important. At least we can try to demonstrate collaborative behaviour at Design Club.
• And if nothing else — we always have our smiling fellow mentors to look at. Here’s a screenshot of us at the end of the session. Relieved co-mentors!

Co-mentoring team clockwise from top left: Mitesh, me, Farzana, Ewa and Kate

Week 5 (Session 4 — 9 Mar)

Planning the session

• The aim of this week’s session was ideation. During our planning meeting, (see “Wk 4” tab in our Google planner), we realised that this stage was going to be HARD. In previous sessions, we’d introduced some basic design concepts, and children had written down initial ideas. In today’s session, everything needed to start coming together — and quickly.
• We realised children would need to make three conceptual leaps in under an hour: (1) How to turn user details (age, gender, location, family, likes and dislikes) into user needs. (2) How to turn user needs into workable feature ideas and (2) How to turn feature ideas into screen sketches.
• Our challenge is “Help your user stay positive”. Luckily, Matt Collins helped us out with this Twitter thread last week. The thread had a few examples of apps that had helped people with their mental health.
• To help children understand how they might come up with feature ideas, we made a separate “features” tab in the Google planner. Using some of the suggestions in Matt’s thread, plus other examples, we made a list of user needs and corresponding features. It looked like this:

List of user needs and possible features for an app to help users stay positive

How the session went

• We worked through “Design your app” — worksheet 8 in the Design an App — short project — and then started filling out “Prototype your app” — worksheet 9.
• It was Mitesh’s turn to lead. He was well prepared and awesome at engaging with the children. But like I said, he had the toughest job yet!
• All of us had agreed to stay an extra half hour to give children time to develop their feature ideas and start completing their screen sketches. But at 5pm, they all politely said goodbye. I guess an hour on Zoom after school is more than enough!
• Despite the challenges, it felt like the session went well. Children were engaged and asking questions, especially in the chat. But we did find it hard to demonstrate exactly what was needed.
• In a real life club, this is where the “magic” happens: children get excited as they start to see how their ideas can become reality. But delivered remotely, behind a web of screens and tech, there is so much to miss. As mentors, we lack a 360 degree view, body language, all types of non-verbal communication. And the children can’t collaborate and support each other, as they would in a room.
• Still, you can see they were doing some good thinking. Here are the worksheets from a boy in Year 8:

One child’s work: identifying user needs and coming up with relevant feature ideas

Whatever happened to the girls?

• We seem to have settled down to a group of 10 regulars — 1 girl and 9 boys. The club started out with 5 girls and 7 boys. We’ve lost 4 girls and gained 2 boys!
• What happened to all the girls? Usually, when Design Club is in a real life classroom, it’s the boys who lose interest while the girls stay engaged. This has reversed with remote — maybe boys have access to better tech, maybe girls have other stuff at home that’s drawing them away. This is strange and a bit alarming. More research needed!

Week 6 (Session 5–16 Mar)

What we did

• This week we were prototyping. We finished filling out “Prototype your app” — worksheet 9 in the Design an App — short project — and started uploading designs using Marvel App.

Before the session

• We asked parents to email us the “Sketch your app” worksheet from last week. I asked four parents who’d been emailing regularly if they’d mind joining the call so we could comply with our safeguarding policy during breakouts.
• We also asked parents to make sure kids had access to a smartphone with Marvel App installed. And gave them Design Club log-in details for the club, so everyone could share and see their work in the same account.

Dogs — an app to help 25 year old Mo stay positive

What happened during the session

• It was Farzana’s turn to lead this week. She dialled into the Zoom call twice — from her laptop AND her phone, so she could talk through a demo while sharing the screen from her phone. (Marvel App used to have a really nice simple demo that worked well for kids. But they seem to have taken it down. We couldn’t find a decent demo for kids anywhere, so we had to create our own).
• Farzana was excellent. She did a great demo of how to create a prototype on Marvel App, and she shared some good examples for inspiration (including original prototypes for Twitter and Instagram). She used our Review app design basics (helpsheet) to help children visualise some of the things they should consider when prototyping their apps.
• After Farzana’s demo, we split into four breakout groups with 1–3 children per group (based on users they’d chosen). Each group had a parent present to ensure safeguarding. All mentors dialled in separately on their phones, in case they needed to demo something more.
• Initially, we tried linking phones as an additional “screen”, but it turned out we needed an extra Zoom plugin that no-one seemed to have or could access!
• Once kids had uploaded their screen photos to Marvel App, we could see the projects as well and help them crop and add hotspots/ links in Marvel App.
• Personally, I learnt to (1) change my Zoom settings so everyone could share screens at once and (2) create breakout rooms. Woah! I feel like an advanced Zoom user. Thanks Ewa for the hacks :)

Happy — an app to help 25 year old Mo stay positive

Troubleshooting

• One of the kids had a problem with a broken camera. Luckily, we already had his completed worksheet, so Ewa was able to take screenshots and upload it to Marvel App herself, then he could take over with adding links etc.
• Another kid still has problems with his phone — he seems to have a really old Samsung Galaxy and doesn’t seem to have the right/ same buttons. We’re going to arrange to do a catch up tutorial with him during the week!
• A couple more kids didn’t upload their projects — it may be they had problems or maybe they set up their own Marvel accounts. Again, I’ll check with their parents during the week.
• Kids work at different paces so some are still finishing their sketches! Hopefully we’ll be able to wrap up everyone’s projects in the final session next week.

Pencil Point — an app to help 9 year old Lizzie stay positive

Week 7 (Session 6–23 Mar)

How it went

• Yesterday was the last session. Oh my goodness! We had a few hitches at the start but I think we managed to pull it off. At the end, all the children turned their cameras on and we had so many smiles, thanks and positive feedback — it was awesome!
• The focus for this week was testing and next steps. We ended up with 7 working prototypes in Marvel App. Not too shabby for a remote club! (3 other children had problems with wifi, missing a class etc, but promised to finish their apps off later).
• Kate had to miss the session — her daughter fell off her scooter and needed an X-ray — so we had to re-jig the breakout groups. Also a slightly different group of children turned up, so again we had to re-jig.
• We knew this session was going to be difficult because by now all the children were working at different stages. Over the six weeks, some had had technical problems (wifi, camera not working, old or non-compatible model of phone), others had missed one or two sessions, others were simply a bit confused or taking a bit longer to complete their designs. But this session was the final one and we needed to wrap everything up. NOTE: Most of these problems happen IRL too!
• We decided to keep any children who hadn’t finished their apps in the “main room” of the Zoom call, while those who had finished could go off into breakouts for testing.

Testing the apps

• Mentors role-modelled the different personas. Mitesh was “Mo”. Farzana was “Lizzy” and “Patricia”. Ewa was “Kamal”. Ewa had a great time listening to a very detailed “You Be The Coach” app which took 11 year old Kamal through various football training exercises (You loved it Ewa)!

You Be The Coach — an app to help 11 year old Kamal stay positive

• It was great working in small groups with the children. So much easier. In small groups, you can just hold hand-drawn sketches and even mobile phones (showing Marvel App) up to the screen. It’s easy to direct children like this. And also, they don’t seem to mind so much turning their cameras on / un-muting when you ask them to.

Wrapping things up

• We all came back to the “main room” for a mini Show and Tell. Sadly we only had time for one design! But quite a few children seemed really excited and super-proud of their apps. When we mentioned the certificates, children asked if they were going to be given out in assembly. Aww!
• We also asked children to go through their “mood jars” and pull out one or two “moods” that reflected their experience of the club. Sadly most kids had forgotten their mood jars — and we’d forgotten to remind them, but that’s when the children started thanking us and talking generally about what a great time they’d had. Teary moment for us mentors!

Play Create — an app to help 18 year old Patricia stay positive

Retro–24 Mar

To help us reflect and assess, we ran a mini retro the day after the final club session. I’ll post a separate update here on the blog very soon!