Client Kick-off: Defining the scope of the project

Team SynchronizED is officially off the ground!

To briefly recap about this project, we are partnering with MindEdge, an Educational Technology company based in Massachusetts, to design a scalable mobile learning framework improve the learning experience for Community College (CC) adult learners.

After finalizing the hunt statement, the team dived into the literature review with 30+ research papers to investigate the landscape for mobile edtech applications coordinated by Shujing and Yu. The team also played around with the apps to get the first-hand experience as well as analyzed the interactions using Richard E. Mayer’s E-Learning principles. In the meantime, we were also planning out the kickoff meeting and prepare the materials to present our preliminary research findings.

Realizing that this was a rare opportunity to have the core team on the ground, we wanted to make the best out of the meeting and have ideation sessions with them. I was already familiar with organizing Design Thinking workshops from my previous work experiences, so I was pretty excited to take up the lead in designing the various activities.

Finally, on February 6, 2020, MindEdge visited Team SynchrnonizED to officially kickstart the 6-month long partnership. Prior to this, we met up with the team once, virtually; hence, it was felt great seeing them in person. After exchanging information and presentations about one another in the first half, we proceeded with conducting the workshop in the second half.

Realizing that not everybody is familiar with the concept of Design Thinking, we started off with a fun warm-up exercise with the following prompt (with no restrictions):

What are the 20 different ways of climbing a mountain?

The client team had a bit of fun with coming up with different experimental and outright hilarious ideas (with one suggestion being a portable booster rocket that would carry you off). The main takeaway of this exercise was that in order to think out of the box, look for multiple ways to approach a specific problem and not design different outcomes altogether: focus on the problem at hand, not the solution.

In order to understand the current landscape of MindEdge as an organization, we then proceeded with a post-it note activity surrounding the Desirability, Feasibility, Viability framework. The different members from the MindEdge team put down notes on what the current state of the business was, what they desired vs. what was feasible on the different aspects of the organization.

For the final activity of the day, the client team designed their ideal student persona and mapped the student’s journey from the pre-MindEdge interaction to what happens once they graduate from the courses and leave the application. This allowed us to brainstorm ideal scenarios along with touchpoints to craft the ideal learner experience.

The workshop was a success and everybody was eager to get on board and get things moving. We had attained loads of information, that was then consolidated and planted the seeds for the next step of the research phase. There was also a need to validate the assumptions of MindEdge with regard to the current context of a community college environment.

To find what happens next, check out the other posts!