Target School and Storyboarding
Target School
In order to narrow the scope of who exactly Natalya Buchwald and I will target with our program, we looked into Pittsburgh, PA public schools and their typical demographics and resources. A summary of our conclusions is as follows:
The typical school that will use our program does not have the resources or the motivation to fund intensive language programs for its third to fifth grade students. It likely serves middle-income areas where basic learning resources (books, writing and coloring implements, etc.) are in good supply, but classrooms and teachers available for instruction of non-core subjects (like foreign language) may be lacking.
The school will have enough computational resources to provide each student with computer time on a regular basis (ie. multiple weekly sessions). This is a reasonable assumption, as many school districts have rushed to invest in computers as educational tools and as symbols of the school’s efforts to keep up with the latest technology.
A number of Pittsburgh public schools fit the above characteristics, confirming the viability of working with this type of learning environment. Almost every K-5 and K-8 school in the district boasts multiple computer lab classrooms, and many have dedicated computer labs as well. Several describe the availability of mobile computers in the form of laptop carts, while a few others do provide personal laptops for each child to use throughout the day as well as at home. The schools describe a range of computer resources typical of districts we imagine using our program: it is important that students have regular access to the computers, but personal devices, classroom desktops, computer lab desktops, and portable laptops can all be used to access our program. Very few of the Pittsburgh public elementary schools, however, employ foreign language teachers for children under the sixth grade level (http://discoverpps.org). As a result, we can easily imagine the schools implementing our program under existing teachers and in order to promote foreign language skills in their young students.
Storyboarding
After refining who will be using our program, we completed a storyboarding excercise to help envision how they will be interacting with it. We are looking towards a model where students can learn from a mix of computer-based activities and television episodes. We intend for our program to be used for four 20–30 minute periods each week, twice with an individual laptop or desktop computer, and twice through video and guided teacher instruction.
We currently envision a program that is structured by weeks consisting of four days. On Day 1, students will be introduced to a short mystery-style narrative following a central character through a 20–25 minute video episode. The episode will consist of some English script as well as emphasized Spanish vocabulary, grammar, and cultural elements. (Early episodes will include much more English than Spanish; the proportion of English words used will gradually decline.) On Day 2, students will interact with the character and environment on a computer to discover more about the mystery. On Day 3, they will receive a 10 minute video update on the case, followed by a teacher-facilitated discussion. On Day 4, students will take steps to help solve the mystery by completing language-relevant tasks; completion of tasks will also serve as assessment of student competency.
Teachers will have the power to check student progress on the program, and assign new episodes each week according to students’ comprehension, interests, and key language topics. All episodes will follow the same central character, but will follow an only semi-structured order: some episodes with vocabulary or grammatical proficiency requirements will be disabled until the users have reached certain content achievements.
Moving Forward
Our next step is to prototype basic screenshots and interactions that we imagine for both video and interactive parts of our program. We will continue to work through our ideas as we develop them from concept to practice.
We do not have any specific questions at this time, but are interested to hear any feedback with regards to our ideas and process.
