Pam Moran & Ira Socol

Driving Question:

How might we inspire and empower a youth maker culture by supporting, aligning, and connecting real-world learning, deeper curricular understandings, and development of maker skills and dispositions throughout the school day?

Defining the User Experience We Desire

“If we look at how we can build around the needs of students, we will absolutely transform their lives, and our roles and values as institutions. Understanding three key things–the user, what they expect from their experience, and how they interact with the system–can help institutions leverage user experience for the benefit of all involved.” - Richard Culatta

“Until not long ago, all classroom settings were static and very much the same: a desk and a blackboard for the educator, books, papers, tables, and chairs for the students. Educators worked in a closed environment where it was enough for them to know their subject matter and how to teach it. Now, the ongoing introduction of technology in the classroom has led to many new elements and, therefore, the need to orchestrate them.” - Muriel Garreta-Domingo

A key word for today is Phygital. Generation Z are, effectively, “born phygital,” meaning that they move seamlessly between the digital and physical worlds, and do not actually see that these worlds are separate. They have typically lived in this world from the first moment mom or dad handed them their cellphone to occupy them. Few things challenge our existing education system more deeply than this “lack of divide,” but as Vince Scheivert said four years ago, “our youngest kids use computers in completely different ways than our secondary kids, and we need to respond to that.”

“Digital natives’ way of understanding the world affects how and when they learn. It also guides their interaction with the tools they use to learn. For starters, they don’t see software as software. They don’t even see it as a machine really. They expect software to be an extension of themselves, to be anthropomorphized and, in many ways, to think for them. My four year old isn’t aware of Youtube’s related videos algorithm. He just expected it to keep serving up videos of Lego ninjas.

“Digital natives despise barriers. Their “all access, all the time” ethos perfectly matches the level of need-fulfillment technology has granted them. Bad UX and poor usability are some of the biggest barriers of all. Digital natives are good at finding workarounds but all that technological coddling has also made them less patient than generations past. If it doesn’t work, if it’s not available on “their device”, they just move on.” - Christopher Grant

Perhaps our preferred response to all this should not be to fight against the present and future, but to design - spaces, technologies, pedagogy, policies - a complete environment that meets the needs of the people our schools exist to serve.

“Working in the field of education redesign, my team used five critical innovation levers, which were: time, talent, technology, space, and money...Educators who are new to innovation, and even veterans who think they get it, tend to have a narrow focus on certain solutions, hence radical collaboration and frameworks are essential to push people out of their comfort zones. Commonly, initial thoughts in education are to implement new curricula or to build more modern classrooms. While those can be innovative remedies in some schools, those ideas are akin to adding new products and do not address systemic or cultural root causes.” - Sarabeth Berk, Ph.D.

How do we begin to see ourselves as architects, as designers, of a complex User Experience for our children? How do we learn to become effective builders of our children’s User Interface?

This shift isn’t easy. Educators are usually not trained in specific forms of vision - ways of seeing - unlike artists, architects, or as Ira often points out, police officers, and they have rarely spent significant time practicing the design process - charrettes, sketches, verifications, critiques. Critiques, in particular, are difficult because educators so rarely view other educators at work.

Change requires courage, and we help people become courageous by networking with them and supporting them. Designers, though we may know famous names, rarely work as individuals - they are teams, and usually teams in constant interaction with other teams.

Creating that networked environment is task number one.