User Study 3: Contextual Inquiry and Survey with Students
After the user study 2 with educators, we decided to conduct a third round of user study with students in maker space course, to see their current working process and how they are feeling towards different methods of documentation.
The purpose of our user study 3 is to understand the students’ perspective on the course and on the documentation of their PBL experiences. These student perspectives can help us better frame our problem space and help us explore more possible solutions.
Study Methods & Process
The methods used in this user study are contextual inquiries and surveys. Contextual inquiry is great for grasping details in their work, but it is less organized. While survey consists of more organized questions and gives us a general idea of the big picture. These two methods were designed to compensate on each other’s short-comes.
We made an appointment with our instructor, and he was kind enough to let us observe one of his regular classes and ask students questions while they are working. The class was in Oct. 18, and there were 13 students in that class., each of their group consists of 2–3 students. We came as a team of three and each observed a group of students, we then asked questions related to the documentation process in their working environment.
For the contextual inquiries, we observed one of the work sessions of the maker space course and asked students questions as they were completing their tasks. This is a semi-structured interview method to obtain information about the context. We focused on the atmosphere in the class, the interactions between teachers and students, how students and teachers document work-in-progress, and how students showcase their work-in-progress to the teacher. Because the students are in their natural working environment, this method can generate more authentic and realistic data and can help us identify some possible unexpected challenges students face. Bringing them into the actual working environment to conduct the inquiry helped us get more authentic responses.
We found that students already have their design notebooks for documentation, and they draw their thinking and prototypes on the whiteboard during work sessions. But their design notebooks were not fully organized with dates and important information like measurements, it was more like a sketch book . And their concept maps on the whiteboard got swiped constantly. Though they have been taking pictures of them, they just forgot about the pictures most of the time, and they wouldn’t look back at those afterwards.
We also designed a survey about students’ current documentation process, and how they feel about it. For the survey questions, we are combining both closed questions and open questions to get both quantitative data and qualitative data from the students. For the structure of the survey, we started with questions about their general experiences of documentation and their motivations for taking this course.
We then asked them about the current tools that they use to document for the course and for themselves. In addition, we examined the students’ openness to better ways of documentation and a class-wide guideline to documentation. The data from this quick, short survey can complement the data from the contextual inquiry to provide us a better view of the students and their context in the maker space course.
We asked the instructor to write down the link on the whiteboard and we got twelve responses in total. The outcome of the survey was close to what we expected, students saying that they were happy with what they have right now, but they did feel sometimes they could forget something and could not find the proper documentation. One thing we did not expect was that students were expressing how much they loved the style of this class, how creative and free it was. We then realized that this free spirit nature of this class was one of the things we don’t want to change, we will just supplement it to be more organized, not rigid.
