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How Ikea Is Defining The State Of Play (With A Little Help From DreamWorks) DIANA BUDDS, fastcodesign.com

Interviews with nearly 30,000 parents and children from 12 countries informed the Lattjo collection of play-oriented design.

Play isn't just about fun and games—it's a valuable way for children to refine their motor skills, learn about the world…

10 dream trips every traveler should experience By Karla Cripps, CNN, cnn.com

(CNN) — There are two types of vacations.

The ones we take once or twice a year to recharge and reconnect with those close to us -- maybe a quick getaway to a resort somewhere hot or a road trip to Disney with the kids.

Then there are t…

Developing Critical Thinking Skills in Elementary Students globaldigitalcitizen.org

It was stated by Stephen Norris back in 1985 that most kids are not equipped to “recognize assumptions, evaluate arguments, and appraise inferences.” According to another statement by psychologists …

Relevant to my thesis. Although I feel the articles still focuses on critically thinking about the existing world and what already happened rather than applying it in decision making, imagination, invention etc.

View Point

While writing my book, while making the lexicon, while going over the research, I am confused as to what exactly my view point is?

I started with broken education then went to > Quality education > Soft skills > Life skills > Education is wrong > Parallel education > Classroom intervention.

While I still believe that education system is broken and needs to change drastically, I feel it still needs smaller steps and breaking down of the path. Let me explain.

Western education is not and should not be an example for India as I once thought. How did the current model of education start? How did it come to becoming a classroom with a person given the authority to teach what they teach? How did come to becoming everything to do with grades, competition, diplomas and jobs? The British brought their education with them to India. Their aim was to make every Indian child think like a white person. They took away children from their indigenous societies and cultures and prepared them for jobs under the British rule. That has remained. Convent schools which parents take pride in sending their kids to are nothing but a continued practice of what the British started.

My thesis started as an advocacy for quality in learning. Learning in classrooms of schools which still follow the same mindset and practices. Education itself is looked as the most nobel and needed in any country and rightly so. Children do need to know about the immense knowledge out there and to know what path they might choose from that. Education provides a framework of the citizens children ought to be which makes for better and responsible society. But education is just the process which is applied in the worst way in schools. Schooling is the problem. My thesis is not about improving understanding problems in schools. I question the entire way the education system is structured. The way schooling school-es children to become another job applicant to the scarce world of jobs. How it prepares children or at-least doesn't prevent them from becoming a passive member of the consumerist world. How it prepares children to only want to become doctors and engineers since that is respectable and honored and other jobs are a consequence of not being good enough. How it trains children to fight for that .5 percent which could decide if they go to the best or the second best which further could change their entire future. And by future I mean how much they would earn, and how expensive their car would be and where they would take their holidays.

Why aren’t education and learning synonymous? Why isnt education about wanting to learn and know more till they have the luxury to do so? Why is a child in the semi-urban parts of India, just going to school, watching TV and going to private tuitions besides doing more homework and household chores?

First step - Provide teenage children in the semi-urban parts of india the interest and motivation into a new world of learning and knowledge.

Second Step - Provide a window of alternate pedagogical methods through a learning game within a public school to rethink the way children learn.

The event was great!

Inching Forward

Among this chaos of unfinished to do lists on Evernote, backlogged assignments, unsatisfying output and time running quickly, it is difficult to be creative, produce work, be passionate and efficient. It is just going to be taking each day as it comes, trying to plan for the the next 1 hour and focussing like you have another year of grad school.

I feel I have lost the ability to apply concepts to my project. I am ready to start finishing things. I know I have a potential service idea ready to become a viable business idea. I have a potential game/kit idea ready to be tested and getting feedback. I have a potential experience coming up this week which will be fun to do with kids. I have a potential idea for Futuring objects and I want to make that potential premise be made into some ideas.

In the middle

When I started this blog in the morning it was going to be “Stuck in the Middle”. A story about a reality check in my thesis. I wanted to write down clearly what deliverable I might have be able to have.

Then I had a great conversation with Joseph Weissgold. He reminded me that it is not about finishing. It is exactly this phase of ambiguity which we learn from. This is what grad school is about.

What I have been doing right is thinking about Macro and micro together. I am giving shape a service which brings together a network of people who want to make a change in the way they learn and in what they learn, and help other people do the same. It is called Evok.Ed - A learning movement.

What I really enjoy and want to do in the future - Bring pieces together and understand complexity only to reframe and generate simple and useful concepts which create big impact. Also, a different version of this which I want to keep doing is give complex and abstraction life. I want to create things which seem ephemeral and make them explicit, relatable and useful as tools to think and reflect.

So at a micro level, with my previous insight of the drawing workshop I organized in India, I want to create a physical toolkit/game which help children communicate visually. Visuals/drawings go beyond language, literacy and grade levels. It is a medium to explore, articulate and reflect at the same time.

Reflecting is important. Any game/activity you do which seems like a conversation with yourself, it will become so important to have that conversation. It is always useful to facilitate a moment of talking to yourself about what happened in that experience of playing that game. How did one feel, what was intended and what happened etc. That is a conversation in full circle.

The other important thing is to define my goal. Visual thinking and visual expression is a huge area. There is a visual vocab which children have and follow. Why do they draw the house every time? Why cant they draw what they ate the previous morning? Is it about giving them the vocab? is it about helping them have a conversation with themselves? Or is it about helping them imagine new ideas beyond reality with a visual tool?

Also children have different mediums of comfort. Is it right to say they all should know how to express visually? Is it about giving them the space to have that dialog with themselves? What can I say about that process and framework?

My experience class should be strategizing this idea of ‘conversation with self’. My career path idea could be overwhelming and tricky. The idea should be more towards them talking to themselves about it.

So now it is about giving it a narrative thread. I want to assimilate the different directions and make them one story. It might be time to edit. Micro enough to tangible-ize something meaningful and worthy of intervention. Macro enough for not moving away from the vision I started from.

I should not be afraid to call it a game. Gamification for incentivizing may be infamous for what it has been used for. Games can be extremely useful. Games can be great tools for learning, thinking and telling stories. A game has rules, it has a winner. The goal of the game would be to communicate with yourself, about yourself, about the world and physicality or about a new imagined world.

What's the point if they leave the country?

A very interesting question came up during the week. I have always been thinking subconsciously of the impact and the core reasons for me to pursue this thesis.

When I was faced with the question, the feelings came rushing to the fore.

My thesis is aimed at empowering children. It wants to improve, change and so on but above all give 'Equal Opportunity'. If children receive good education and want to leave the country, they would at least have the option to do so. It would be better than no option. That is what I aim for.

My education was equally broken. I am lucky to have had that choice despite not having very rich parents. Why is it that more children could have that option and be braver than me to stay back and give back to their country.

Resolution and Fidelity

It was great and scary to see our works through these quadrants of resolution and fidelity.

Half of my work lies in the low fidelity and low resolution quadrant. And the other half in low fidelity and high resolution quadrant. I have realized it is not hard for me to make something believable and look final enough, but for me those are for starting conversations and see it as real so there is reaction.

My next steps are simply to filter down and create products of high fidelity and high resolution.

I am fairly excited about how my service idea is coming about. I would have wished that course to give me more tools to come up with service ideas and go ahead with the best one. It felt like I was under pressure to come up with one and then given feedback on how to present it better. I am still not sure how great an idea it is. How worthy is it to pursue? Personally I have a good feeling.

I am very excited to call my thesis a 'learning movement'. I see it as giving power to the citizens, the learners, the teachers to feel the need for change and to work towards changing it. It is in response to the unsuccessful efforts people put it in order to convince the government. I see successful design as radical design.

It was a great discussion on 'Diagrams'. It was more effective having done a mapping exercise as homework.

I was hoping to put most of my research in the infographic form easily understandable by anybody interested in understanding the Indian Education scenario of this demographics.

I would like to make it better, with headings and subheadings, crisper language and more relations between entities. I would have liked to state some opportunity areas too especially where my thesis is.

Further I would like this as a starting point for laying out research in my book.

Who, Where, How

This past week has been more intense than ever. I organized my first workshop (gathered people in a city where I knew nobody) for one of our courses. It was rewarding just to see so many people connected to the issue, Indians and Americans.

When I told them to describe what their hope before the exercise and what their vision is after the exercise for learning/education in 2050, the answers were so inspiring to say the least. There were visions such as: A movement, Responsive, Unbiased, Process Driven.

After having done the Who, Where, How exercise I realized that there should be more ways to reach my persona by other designers and people who feel close to the cause. I got very excited at the prospect of creating that platform for starting this conversation of common platform for contributing to an idea bank and design detailed implementation plans.

NEEDS:

I did rethink the needs of my participant. The problem comes when I have to imagine her needs as she would be telling me about it. I first wrote 'Independent thought' and 'Self Awareness' but she would never tell me that her needs are that. Then I wrote 'Cannot understand what the teacher teaches' and 'Don't know the importance of going to school', which may not be true. A sincere student like my persona 'Divya' knows the importance. The problem is that the importance has been instilled in the form of fear. It is not fun to learn anymore. It is the fear of not having completed the homework, of not understanding well enough in class, of not meeting her parents' expectations, not performing as well as some others.

But my thesis is not about removing this fear, neither is it to remove competition. If they happen as a side effect, great, but I aim to bring to schools more than academics. I am helping my persona to develop her independent thought and challenge herself and the understanding of 'the way things are supposed to be'. I want kids to get out of the reinforcing social cycle and realize their true worth.

CONTEXT:

Semi Urban Environments

Public Schools

Non conducive environment for independent thought

Traditionalist parents

Time constraints (Balancing chores, homework and play)

Unmotivated teachers

Academic priority (to be able to finish prescribed syllabus)

Aspiring class (Have expectations from children)

Feels a bit of pressure of being a girl

CHANNELS:

Enitities----

Teach For India (Their resources for schools, teachers and feedback)

Pilot Schools (School Authority, Teachers interested)

Other NGOs

State Government

Parents (Awareness and benefits)

Video to pitch the solution

Solutions-----

3 Tool kits

Open source platform

Explanatory video

Creating a social enterprise (Brand, website)

Curriculum Plan ( Some ideas on a bigger picture)

FACTORS

Designing for children is a balance

Validation from trusted sources

Time Management and Goal setting

Child psychologists

Affordable and Understandable

All continuum directions

Plan and Plan to have a Plan

Why what and how!

I answered a lot of the why in my first writing assignment while describing the territory and users. The next writing assignment will help me to stress on it a bit more through personal, academic, designer's and opportunities lenses.

I have started to focus in on a general framework of how my work wants to exist.

"To create an environment/new ways of 'evoking thought' for children (6 - 12 years) in public schools (classrooms)."

It will be great to expand on that, put my ideas against the continuums, and then hone into what it is possible for the next weeks and is in tandem with my intents.

It is also very helpful to treat this as one big project and not 5 courses. It will be exciting to create a body of work with these courses as tools, lenses and excuses.

It will be hard to test. My biggest fear was and still is how I could design something radical enough to be appreciated but realistic enough to be taken forward.

The above is an example of a pitch for a new a subject. The idea is to pitch to the education ministry in India to include 1 hr a week of 'Evoking Though' Lessons which would include Activities, Games, Workbooks etc.

It is a great starting point to now be able to expand and connect how this ecosystem might work. What does it want to do? How does it benefit the other stakeholders? What are those crucial things which need to be communicated/taught/ made to realize?

#education #thesis #plans

I want to create a social impact, which stems from furstration of how things currently are. My aim is to also showcase a designer in a different light in India. The most question I hear is, "I thought you were doing design, why are you interested in education?".

I don't want to just create a new conversation but also show how it is possible by making ideas which are viable and thought through. These solutions, I aim to make should be able to trigger some talk and grab some attention. It might need to be extremely smart as a solution.

I want to make an experience for children which is rich in engagement for the simple reason that they thrive in groups and get excited with some hype while also letting experiences benefit on a personal level. But the tools/solutions would be able to be used as a skill or physically through their life and not just a one time experience.

Intent and Continuum

Like all classes, yesterday's class was one step towards having some clarity. Knowing that Good is subjective and it is the decisions you make which direct your project and create a referral point, not what is good in taste, good for the teacher or good on your portfolio.

It is hard to make these decisions, especially when you believe and ambitiously want to satisfy all what you dreamt of. It is hard when you have to choose between two seemingly amazing outcomes or influencers, and want both to happen.

Choosing my scale for continuum was hard. It was difficult to find words which were going in opposite directions. Some felt like cause and effect and other just had obvious bend towards one. So when I wrote down all possibilities, I chose the ones which I didn't know the answers to. As Abby said, people shouldn't be able to tell which direction I might go. At this point even I don't know. If I knew before I wrote it, it wasn't a strong decision making point.

Social Impact ------------------------Academic Pursuit

New Conversation is Education-------------------------Helping a child

Innovative/New-------------------------High Acceptability

Experiential ---------------------- Tool for life

Collaborative Experience------------------------Personal Journey

I will post in the "Part2" of this blog about intent, defense and today after I have received feedback from Abby.

#Clarity #Intent #thesis #continuum

What do kids really need?

Over the course of the last semester, I have gathered knowledge about the problem area. There is clearly a problem in the learning quality in schools. And there is another issue of accessibility.

My endeavor started out towards question why children have to limit their learning to schools? Why can’t it be extended outside and beyond? what happens to lack of interest, attendance or accessibility?

If I break down further these questions together with my observation of the demographic of kids I spent time with, the endeavor might have found some more clarity.

Children are naturally curious, enthusiastic and happy. They find things to keep themselves busy. They play, observe and do. This amazing image starts cracking where schools come into the picture. Content and pedagogical style can turn a brilliant student into a dull one. Let alone children picked from rural background with no motivation and no such environment at home.

Children are taught to love schools. They are told it is the right thing to say and right thing to do. They are patted on the back for saying they want to . If on one hand it is great to enforce an attitude like that which might turn into a reality, it might also be possible that student is feeling compelled and pressured.

I always knew I was designing for children. The problem started there. Till last semester, I hadn't spoken to more than 1 kid at a time, from the demographics I am aiming to serve. With the workshop, where I spent 45 mins each with 4 batches of 15 kids, I have clarity going forward.

Inspite the clarity, the complexity in designing for kids remain. From what I noticed in the workshop, it is a great balancing act to be designing for kids.

My biggest struggle was to engage them in the most exciting fun way but also allow the quiet ones the chance to speak up and play along. It became very crucial for a game to be collaborative and participatory and at the same time be a great personal experience.

The other challenge was the gap between making something and them understanding it the way you want them to. When I am designing something, I already feel I have made the decision of the message I want them to get, the way I want them to get. The only thing they would be doing is finding the "right" answer, the one I am expecting.

I put the set of dice in from of them. They looked at all sides and were curious to just know the "rules". They knew there were some guiding principles to be able to get the maximum fun of the game. I explained, then explained some more. They struggled to make a sentence with two words in it. The ones they came up with were forced and made no sense. (they were not creative association, it was weird things kids just love to say). So, I gave them an "example". Miraculously they got it. At least a few did, and others followed suit. I threw in a challenge aspect, to ask another person in front of you the question you made up and they would answer. That way the onus is distributed.

What was interesting was that giving an example led them onto the path I wanted them to be on. Although very successful, could I have inflicted some bias in it? Did they feel the game was now about asking meaningful questions and giving the "right" answer which gets you the pat on the back?

#kids #education #balance #tricky #workshop #india #complex

Fears and Obstacles

We all went with fear in our minds. Fear of school ending, right thesis topic, 5 courses, scheduling etc. It was great to start class by thinking about it and put it out there. To know everyone is on the same boat.

All my fears and obstacles are tied to designing from afar. Not being around children in India and not being able to constantly test and get feedback. I fear this will raise questions on authenticity and proof.

Another fear is to prove what is truly Indian about my designs. India has a very rich culture, vast and diverse everything. It is difficult to point at anything truly Indian. Indian products are driven by need, scarcity and frugality. It is driven by social and political pressure and emotions.

Even though bringing soft skills, critical, independent and creative thinking is a global issue, India has it's own unique constraints. And a whole web of constraints. In the scope of this thesis and the time, it is my fear that I will not land on something which address this web of things.

I am still extremely excited about designing fun and enjoyable and meaningful things for children. I believe so strongly in the power of opportunity and accessibility to learning and that it makes all the difference to ones life.

I don't know what risks I can potentially take. It is already risky to be designing for children. At this is point I feel I should be trusting my instincts and just going for it.

#education #SVA POD #Thesis

Thesis 1

It was a great process for filtering and dissecting our topics. The various lenses forced us to look in directions which brought our ideas closer to becoming a thing.

I was especially lost with trying to do too many things and solving for everything. It was great to find my way and focus by experimenting, making and talking.

The things I took away from my experience in Thesis 1 is that I would never know where I am going next or what is right, but I should always keep making sooner to be able to fail sooner.

It was great to put in physical form the philosophy I want be heard and accepted. Giving it form, started a conversation which was great for feedback and research in India.

#Thesis #SVA POD #education

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