Design Phase: Final Prototype

Authors: Miaojun Xu, with Yu Zhao, GyuEun Park, and AnnaB

Website

Click here to view the website we implemented as our final prototype. We will further introduce its features and usage in context as follows.

Platform usage in context

An isolated standard process for creating a new reflection will be:

For this functionality, students can have different usage contexts:

F1. Support Big Picture Understanding through Project Journey. Each time after students completed a step, they can use the “create new reflection” function to seriously, completely and thoroughly reflect on their journey. During the project, students can refer back to what they have recorded, felt, and learnt in the previous steps as well as iterate on the current step. Project Journey supports learning through making the connection among steps visible.

F2.1 Scaffolding Reflection through emoji and learning progress bar.

EureKAS makes reflection easier by allowing students to choose emoji to get an easy start and to indicate learning on the progress bar, before they move on to the actual reflection.

F2.2 Granting autonomy in choosing the medium to reflect. Students can choose to write, sketch, audio-record or video-record for their reflection.

F2.3 Design progressive reflection prompts to scaffold reflection. During the semester, students will first face scaffolded reflection prompt in detail to get an easy start. For example, they will be provided simple and specific reflection questions like “what is the most difficult part of implementing the robot?”. As the project goes, they will face more open-ended and thoughtful questions to better develop their metacognitive learning skills.

F3. Unorganized thoughts/inspirations are stored in playground. However, we do not want this platform to restrict students reflection to a specific learning moment when they complete each step. So we provide the “playground” functionality to motivate students to reflect in every small learning moment.

Every time students have a moment that they feel worthy to record, they can upload the information and tag them for future usage. The information are highly unstructured with no restrictions on what to record. But students are asked to think about how these information can be further used in future improvements by tagging them.

Students can use this information when they feel frustrated with the current step to get more inspiration, and when they write the serious reflections about the whole step to provide more detailed evidence.

A boarder usage of the platform

Aside from the main stakeholder, the students, this process can also have teachers, peers, and parents participated in. Teachers will set the learning goals for the steps, monitor students progress and feeling throughout the process, and provide in-time support to students. Parents can easily learn about what their children have done in school, how they felt about it and what they have learnt through visualization of outcomes and the evidence of the progress at any time. Students can also share their learning and feeling through their reflections, provide and receive suggestions for peers, and iterate on their own reflection.

Combined with these contexts and other characters, the usage of this platform can be summarized in the following diagram. The red blocks are where other characters step in, the blue blocks are students actions, and the green blocks are the actions that can be performed on the platform.