Scenario ideas for the learning experience — 04.13.2021
What are your scenario ideas for your learning experience? Illustrate and Describe. What role is form — textual, visual, aural, temporal, tactile, etc. — playing in your ideas?
Our learning experience and the scenario that we developed are focused on aiding our learners to fill two major gaps. The first gap identified through user interviews is the limited understanding of what constitutes good health among our stakeholders. While physical and mental health were recognized across all the users, other dimensions of health & wellness did not get any mental space. The second gap is the perception that aspects of intellectual and occupational wellness are subjective, difficult to learn and measure. Through our learning experience, our goal is to help our learners understand the different aspects of wellness, provide a tangible experience to reduce the abstract and subjective nature of wellness, and learn ways to improve intellectual and occupational wellness.
The scenario for our learning experience identifies a freshman student at CMU who considers himself to be healthy. His definition of health stems from his regular physical fitness activities and eating healthy meals occasionally. But he is constantly stressed about his future and his decisions. He feels disturbed all the time. During his appointment with his career advisor, he learns about the learning experience about wellness and tries it out. He is introduced to a story of 2 individuals who have contrasting approaches to learning and career planning. He uses the wellness charts and plots the wellness for the fictional characters. He gets comfortable with the tangible way to express wellness and goes about plotting his own wellness. He observes the need to improve some aspects of his wellness. The learning experience points him towards the next step.
In the next part of the learning experience, he comes across a board game with different characters to choose from. He chooses a character that seems more like him and starts playing. Each step of the game is a milestone in the life of the character and he accesses different information cards to make choices that have consequences, impacting the overall wellness of the character. He plots the wellness of the character using the wellness chart throughout the game and understands how different aspects of wellness are interconnected. Throughout the game, he realizes how informed decision-making and planning the career based on one's values, interests and skills have an impact on the overall wellness. He exits the learning experience with ideas to improve his own wellness.
The major takeaways intended from our learning experience are
- There is more to health and wellness than physical and mental health.
- By improving intellectual and occupational wellness, overall health & wellness can be improved.
- Intellectual & occupational wellness can be improved through easy steps and progress can be seen.
The forms which we have considered for our learning experience are majorly tactile, visual, and textual.
Figure 1 & 2: Overall wellness chart to plot the wellness throughout the learning experience
Figure 3: Intellectual wellness scale
The form and the type of learning experience were decided based on the following considerations:
- As the idea of intellectual and occupational wellness are perceived to be subjective, we want to provide a tactile experience of plotting the wellness on wellness chart and scales.
- To reduce the anxiety in career planning or self-assessment, we have included the fictional characters and role-playing into the experience to provide scaffolding to learn about intellectual and occupational wellness.
- In order to show the continuous aspect of maintaining wellness, the board game considers milestones from college until retirement for roleplaying.
- Wellness is sometimes considered personal and has different levels of comfort for everyone. So we wanted the experience to be individualized and not a collaborative experience.
