🥺 Here at the end of all things (our final post)

Zeroing in on our intervention

As of this post, we only have a couple weeks until our final presentation and the culmination of our work over the past eight months (wow, that sounds like a long time). In recent weeks, we have given a lot of thought to where we started and where we are now. We conducted research back in the spring that led us to a journey map of Black educators experiences, in which we isolated points at which educators are at risk of feeling pushed out of education. In evaluating our model with educators, we found that a common factor at these points in time can be attributed to the failure of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion(DEI) policy. Throughout the summer, we eventually zeroed in on this issue, and are delivering an intervention that both allows educators to be informed of DEI policy performance and give feedback, and also gives administrators the opportunity to make changes based on the shortcomings their community members are experiencing.

The rough diagram exhibited here represents the value flow of our intervention. The major stakeholders are early educators, experienced educators who also have experience with DEI policy, and school administrators. Through our interface they exchange information about the policy as it’s written and how it is implemented in reality, and the important skill of being able to critique policy.

Another important aspect of our intervention is the service FAME can provide surrounding the digital interface we are working on, as they are experts in the education field. We imagine that FAME is the perfect group of experts to facilitate the communication we have found to be missing in the education community here in Pittsburgh.

“We’ve become really motivated to imagine the service surrounding our digital tool, not just the design of the tool itself. This is all in anticipation of crafting a story about FAME’s potential during our final presentation.”

— Martina Tan

Vision for the future

The first step we took towards crafting our vision of FAME’s growth was to prototype what our intervention could look like in the future. This took the form of a Figma prototype. The value of this platform is that from here, interfaces can be handed off to developers relatively easily.

We hope that this high visual fidelity prototype can help communicate to our clients the potential we see in the intervention we are developing.

We created a user flow in our prototype that would allow users to discover the written policy of a certain school, as well as what teachers at that school are saying about how the policy is implemented in reality. These screens are entry points to that information. They also highlight the FAME score of this hypothetical school, which we used to elicit what educators expect that score to represent.

“This phase of our project allowed me the opportunity to lead our team through our last design sprint, and it was brilliant. From working on recruiting, applying our design system for visual consistency, and ultimately testing and iterating our solution, it has been a wild ride!”

— Marlon Mejia

Developing a ‘minimum viable product’

In addition to creating the high fidelity visual prototype shown above, we realized that all our work would only be valuable to FAME if accompanied by a version of the intervention that could be deployed immediately. This is when we decided to spend the last weeks of our capstone developing an “MVP”, or minimum viable product.

After spending much of the summer testing our high fidelity digital prototype with users, we had a lot of information about what features of our interface make or break a user’s experience. To decide what platform would host our mvp, we prioritized these features using the MoSCoW method and then compared the results to what different potential platforms would enable.

By using the MoSCoW prioritization method, we were able to tally which software would best fulfill the requirements of the functional prototype we wanted to deliver to FAME. Ultimately, we prioritized the ability to view and add reviews to the interface and chose software accordingly.

We eventually settled on google sites, integrating the capabilities of google docs and google forms.

This screen of our MVP represents many features that we were able to carry over from our original Figma prototype. The main difference between the two experiences is the level of interactivity in leaving comments on policies.

After deploying the MVP, our clients will be able to bring the idea to funders with evidence that it works, and have the option to bring our high-fi visual prototype to developers to be built.

We have started to work on a visual model of how FAME can move forward from this point with the goal of fully implementing our intervention in the future. We call this FAME’s “scalability roadmap”. As shown here, the first step is to deploy the MVP, which we hope we can enable FAME to do very soon.

“I was impressed by our team’s creativity in crafting a function-focused tool for our clients. It is my hope that this can help them and the education space. Very exciting that the tool can be used right away!”

— Leanne Liu

Preparing to bring our vision to the public

One of the most important ways our work from this past year will be realized is in our summer presentation. We have been preparing for the presentation all summer, and practicing as a team for the past week and we still have a couple more weeks to iron out the details. Overall, we feel confident that we can sell the vision of our intervention to FAME, donors, and the education community.

Gamifying some of our presentation practice sessions has helped us deal with nerves and take some of the pressure of presenting off of ourselves. In this practice session, we randomly paired up (hence the color wheel) to practice giving the presentation completely improvised. Since then, we have been increasing the scaffolding of our rehearsals as needed, but everyone is getting more comfortable with not having a full script.

“We’ve had faculty, staff and FAME, and colleagues all go over drafts of this presentation and have really done all we can to make it the best. I believe in the vision we’ve crafted for FAME and I have faith in all the work we’ve done. Now all that’s left is to convey this confidence to others!”

— Swetha Kannan

Coming to the end of our time as a team (but the friendships last forever)

Over these past eight months we really have become so close as a team. It’s crazy to think that we won’t be seeing each other every day any more. On top of learning so much from each other and helping each other grow, we have also had a lot of laughs along the way.

Our wall of whiteboards has not only become a sprawling reflection of our teamwork, but also a place for us to keep track of our innumerable inside jokes. For example, “stocks are up on Poppins”.

Another way we took a break from the grind was by making paper cranes, a hobby many of us picked up from Martina. It’s a great way to relax, and also a perfect way to upcycle used post-its. No one is sure exactly how many we have, but it’s at least a few hundred.

We’ve gotten the chance to do some team building activities separate from work and out of the office, one of them being kayaking on the Conemaugh River during a trip to visit one of FAME’s partner schools.

“Working with this team has allowed me to experience an incredibly supportive environment in which to develop my skills. I wasn’t sure what our advisors meant by psychological safety at the beginning of this program, but now if I forget I can just think back to this team.”

— Alana Mittleman