Cutting Cubes Out of Fog
“When you get to this point of confusion, then you know you’re in the right place.”
That was the advice given to inspire confidence in our team at a very important junction in our summer research project. The goal: to create a mixed reality experience in a middle school education setting.
This junction came after conversations with experts in S.T.E.A.M. education (Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, and Math) and virtual reality. At this point we had taken apart and examined each of these talks and produced a flurry of design principles to guide our future progress. Three of the most compelling of these principles are:
- Technology (in the classroom) is good in that it allows fast feedback. Computers allow students to quickly see how successful their efforts are at a pace that has yet to become possible for traditional making, such as woodworking. If someone is building a website, they can check if it works with each line of code, but if they are building a canoe, it may be two days of labor before they realize they’ve made a critical measurement error that could lead to their boat sinking.
- Prompting with essential questions creates engagement and freedom to explore. Commands like, “do this math equation” are by no means incorrect—I happen to love doing math problems—but they don’t lend themselves to interpretation; the educator anticipates a correct answer. However, if the prompt is “make a mask” or a thought-provoking question like, “How would I use something that hides my identity to portray my personality?,” the results can be unexpected, delightful, and truly inspired.
- Maker education helps students develops soft skills in ways that traditional education can’t. The traditional classroom is generally boiled down to one measure of achievement: grades. Maker education,—a style that focuses on students building projects that often have S.T.E.A.M. leanings—opens up new outlets for students to succeed. Group work on these projects allows students to assume leadership roles and share skill sets that would ordinarily go untapped. For example, we heard of a student that was able to provide support in his classroom with the skills he acquired in his after school maker program.
Time to Refocus
With these insights in hand we reached a saturation point—continuing to research no longer pushed us forward. It was time to start bringing it all together. It was time to start cutting cubes out of fog.
When you first step into the fog that is information overload, you’re bound to stumble at least a few times. And stumble we did.
This stumble came from the sheer number of questions and decisions that still needed to be identified. What exactly do we want the children to learn? What kind of interactions will best accompany this lesson plan? How do we prototype those interactions to prove they are the best? The list of questions grew with each framework we applied. We needed to step back and reevaluate where we wanted to be at the end of the project and how we want to get there.
With an end goal in mind, we produced our grand plan. It now serves as our guiding light through the surrounding shroud of confusion. To develop this grand plan, as a group we determined where we wanted to be at the end of the project by defining potential end deliverables—a presentation and a video that demonstrate the full potential of our mixed reality platform, experience, and product. Rather than create the minimum expected deliverable, we’ve agreed that there needs to be something that actually immerses a user the same way a finished product would.
Breaking down major goals into more minor tasks will help us understand what exactly we are honing in on with each step in the coming weeks. No longer will questions beyond the scope of that particular day bog us down as we begin exploring learning objectives, mixed reality interactions, and how to prototype those interactions.
Andrea Everman, Sarah Mitrano, Ian Morrow, and Daniel Park are interns at Moment in New York. Sarah is a recent graduate of Washington University with a BFA in communication design; Daniel is a junior at Parsons pursuing a BBA in strategic design and management; and Ian and Andrea are pursuing MDes degrees at the IIT Institute of Design. They’re all currently exploring the intersection of mixed reality and children’s education. You can follow the team’s progress this summer on Momentary Exploration.
UPDATE: The Moment summer 2016 intern project is live here.
