4/6 Framing the Learning Experience
How we conceive the learning experience as a system and the facet(s) we aim to realize as a first step.
During the class on last Thursday, our group looked back at all the activities we have done and the theories we have applied during our past brainstorming about our financial literacy teaching goal. We worked on this activity majorly through three lenses
- what parts of our ideas have changed since we first visited that activity?
- Which activities are comparatively more important to us or tied closer to our design prompt
- Based on the activities, we further contextualized the “form” of our design idea
What changed?
This is our previous Stakeholder Mapping. Our initial stakeholders were “soon-to-be-graduate students”, “Educators”, and “Financial professionals”. Based on the previous activity, we had two consequential design ideas. One involves traditional classroom building and course structure design that bridge the school researchers and financial practicers. We gradually steered away from this idea and invested more into the other idea based on our findings from later activities.
Our second idea, which is the approach we now focus on, has only the students as our key stakeholders. But instead of having them as one big group, we further narrowed down them into three sub-categories. The sub-categories are high school students, college undergrad students, and graduate students.
While we might have opportunities to cooperate with the educators and financial professionals, we categorized them as indirect stakeholders.
Something we are trying to decide on is that in our game, should we plan our path for one specific group or should it be versatile to all three user groups? In thinking a potential solution for this question, we re-examined our points of affinity and points of opposition.
To this point, we did not have a sure answer yet, but this was the question we constantly brought up as we later look closely into the form of our game.
The Key Activities (Learning Model)
The key activities we identified were Skill Acquisition, Establishing Effective Over-Arching Structures, Motivation, and the Cycle of Practice and Feedback.
Our learning model emphasizes the idea that our group is targeting of accommodating for different learners who are coming in at different stages of knowledge and skills by using scaffolding.
Skill Acquisition: The important aspects of its concepts are stages in the development of mastery, and maybe scaffolding the learning incline. We brought up the idea of unconscious incompetence and conscious incompetence when thinking about on boarding session of the game as a mean to customize learning experience for different learners. Some people, possibly those who are already entering into the society, might know what they care about based on their life experience (conscious incompetence); others might be fresh to this domain and needs us to design a track that guide them into knowing what contents are relevant, so they will be using our game as a preventative learning tool.
Establishing Effective Over-Arching Structure: Our learners might have different starting points (knowledge based of personal finance) and different interest (relevant topics related to different stages of life). Therefore, we wish to further define a game path that can fit with all or a structure that allows each to customize their learning experience within this scope.
Motivation: We again recognize that finance is an intimidating topic for many people by its nature. It’s serious and complex. How do we build motivation? Two aspects we narrow into are the intention and the additional fun. The basic motivation is users’ need in preparing themselves a clear financial plan, which is an unavoidable life topic itself. We aims to empower learners to be critical finance thinker by providing systematic, survival kind of learning experience. For additional fun, we talked about the “ending” of each cycle of our game. As a recap, our game would convey the idea of “game of life”. So in each users’ life path, they would go through each financial demands (ex. paying student loans, comparing job benefit, insurance plan evaluation). While we will try to make this life path itself interesting, we also plan to bring in some “customization” and “competition”. For that purpose, we would design the “ending” of the game to be a final “retirement life” based on the insurance plan, assets, and cash that the user own in the end. We are not going to make the outcome black and white comparison. There is no best retirement life. What we want to do is to make each round of game moderately quick in length of time and quickly visualize the consequence of different spending habit so that users can pre-experience their life without real expense. By doing that, people would be motivated to share their customized output (this can be an image/page that encourage users to share on social media), and also bring in the social aspects to make it even more interesting.
Cycle of Practice and Feedback: In thinking about our game and its overall structure, our group really wanted to emphasize the idea of being able to play through the game / various points, then receiving feedback along the way (after each checkpoint). With all that feedback, the learner is able to go back to practice new skills or skills that they have already gone through but want to try again.
Our Learning Model
Form and Context
We have two ideas about the form. While the idea of “game of life” remain unchanged, some elements we are considering and trying to decide on are the components of multi-player interaction, customization of life path, and whether it should include physical components at all.
Based on the above variables, the two form we now have are 1) a completely digital game where people would not interact with others, with high level of customization on life path 2) a combination of digital and physical components — a set of monopoly board game style cards that users scan and whose content would present digitally to allow for customization. More ideas about the interaction were brought up, and we were still looking forward to narrow down more on that.
