Research Phase Insights and Implication
Part 1: Narrowing down of problem space
The findings from our user studies have led us through the exploration of possible problems and the narrow-down of the problem space.
1)
From our initial field visit, the possible problems we have identified are in collaboration between students, tracking student work, and working with community mentors.
2)
From our interviews with the course instructor and the school director, we have refined our problem space by eliminating some possible problem areas and identifying new problem areas. We have found that collaboration between students is actually not a problem for the maker space course. When the students take this maker space course, they should have studied in the upper school for at least two or three years and be familiar with other students. Students would know the strengths and weaknesses of their teammates and coordinate within the teams. Therefore, we have excluded this problem for our later research.
We have also identified the problem areas of project documentation, student assessments, feedback, and showcase from the repeating themes in the interviews. However, it is interesting that the issue of assessments is the primary concern of the school director, while the course instructor does not put much emphasis on it in the interviews.
3)
From our follow-up co-design session with the course instructor, we have found that the course instructor is able to appropriately assess the students and student teams, even when they are working on different projects because he is maintaining a close working relationship with the students and tracking their progress and effort. On the other hand, it is a problem for the school administrator because she cannot see the work process and therefore cannot appropriately assess students’ work and effort.
The problem of assessment then becomes the problem of explicitly showing the value of student work and students’ work process, rather than keeping them between the students and the instructor. In order to show the students’ work process and the value of students’ work, proper documentation of the work process is needed.
4)
From our user study 3, we have dug deeper into the documentation of the work process from the students’ perspective. From this user study, we have found that although students are documenting their ideation process, they are not keeping their documentation in an organized manner for long-term use. Students do not realize the value of long-term documentation because documentation is not required for the course and the only motivation for their long-term documentation is the final showcase.
From these three user studies, we have found that documentation is the root problem for many other problems in assessments, feedback, and showcase. Without good documentation, it will be hard for students to showcase their design process and iterations and therefore hard for the assessment of their improvements and effort.
