1/28 Finding the Topic

During the last class, we all felt that we should definitely narrow down the topic and develop clearer territory. Today, we had a long meeting and tried to find interesting themes related to the future of education

We looked through some ACM papers about the MR-based education solutions. Overall, there are five main topics that have been dealt by researchers:

• Body-based metaphor — helps K-12 students learn difficult/abstract concepts such as STEM subjects.
• Embodied learning — facilitates skill-based learning such as job training
• Responsive facilitation — provides real-time feedback through remote tutors/guides
• Simulating situation — creates virtual spaces and trains learners to get used to a certain situation
• Motivating creative thinking — helps students develop the ability to come up with new ideas

In addition to the possible topics, we also came up with other issues that should be considered for our solution:

• Alternative credentials — we need to adopt a new type of assessment to measure academic achievement
• Gamification — the solution should be able to motivate learning with fun like Duolingo.
• Big data and data privacy — we must consider ethical issues when collecting personal data. We don’t want to expose sensitive private data through our mixed reality solution.

We all agreed that we don’t want to work on embodied learning and body-based metaphor because they are already explored enough. Therefore, we decided to focus on situation simulation and providing real-time feedback.

The next step is to choosing the subject. Based on the examples and our interests, we brainstorming further about the types of learning and categorized them. Among the candidates, we chose three final topics: Medical decision, Music education, Spoken language. Each topic has pros and cons, so we listed up the advantages and limitations about each of them and discussed which one might be the best for us.

Pros:

• Medical decision: Definitely there are clear needs and target users. It is also an exciting topic to delve into because the concept is novel. On the other hand, it is a serious issue for families who are confronting big surgeries.
• Music education: Since Allison and I have done the related projects, we know where to start research. Also, we are all excited to work on music education. Finally, we can target wider audience.
• Spoken language: Just like medical decision making, there is a clear problem space but has a wider users. It is also easy to find access because Allison know some linguistic professors. Besides, we can delve more into interactions happen between different language speakers.

Cons:

• Medical decision: Here is the big problem — none of us has any contact on the healthcare field in Pittsburgh. It might be also really hard to conduct user tests, as most families who have a patient would be reluctant to participate in the test.
• Music education: The biggest problem in this topic is that there is no clear problem space. We all know that music education boosts students’ STEM learning ability. However, there must be more desperate needs. Also, the solution might not help students who don’t have enough talent in music.
• Spoken language: This topic is less novel than the others. Overall, language learning is more explored and there are so many solutions outside. At this moment, it is hard to convince ourselves to adopt the MR technology in this field.

After the long discussion, we felt that medical decision making might be too hard topic to work on the whole semester, so we scoped out the topic.

It was really hard to make a decision between music and spoken language because both music education and spoken language education are very interesting. While there is an apparent needs in language learning, we need to explore a specific problem space if we choose music education. However, we all hesitated to choose language education because we couldn’t envision an innovative solution.

Each of us is on the same page that we don’t want to create an instant translation solution nor traditional language education tools. Instead, what happens if we approach language acquisition process as cultural learning? We pivoted the topic to language as a culture and we were all happy to delve more into the relationship between a learner and his/her surrounding environment.

We came back to the design brief to clarify the challenges we should take into account.

• The idea must be innovative, technically feasible
• Should minimally show awareness or explore solutions
• The solution should be integrated with everyday life
• Should meet a clear need and be extensible to wider applications

So, we began expanding our thoughts starting from potential stakeholders (people) who affect the process of language acquisition such as parents, friends, families, tutors, teachers, service providers, locals, and co-workers.

We also thought about things that affect language acquisition including street signs, menus, media(radio, tv, newspaper), products, textbooks, online, and advertisements. Things, we thought, are basically either a intended medium with which people use when learn/teach language or things that contain cultural factors and unintendedly influence/help people’s language acquisition.

In addition to that, as we are going to approach our solution with cultural aspects, we spoke about a number of cultural factors such as holidays, history, gestures, ethics, religions, facial expressions, values, traditions, dress, social norms, ceremonies(festivals), genders, and slangs/idioms. We assume that these factors critically affect learning spoken language.

After brainstorming all the factors that are related to language acquisition, we tried to map these and create territory map based on certain categorization.

INDIVIDUAL
What we did is, mapping the four key skills, which is the most basic skills, for any learner of a new language. Those are reading, writing, listening, and speaking.

CLOSE to HOME: limited immersion
Then we extended this individual learning experience to the most basic environment that surrounds learners and teachers. Many language learners begin learning these skills in school or familial settings, or both. However, there is limited immersion here.

SOCIAL CONTEXT: full immersion
For the fastest and most effective language learning, full immersion is essential. Many students travel abroad and embed themselves in another culture and social context, a process that is both intimidating and empowering.

CULTURAL LEARNING
We assumed that out of full immersion comes true cultural learning and understanding. We believe that language learning is not just about the four key skills we identified, but that it can lead to a deeper understanding of cultures that are different than our own. From this came the ‘clear need’ of learning a new language and understanding a new culture can be intimidating process and how through our design we could address that.