Design Challenge

The team aims to design an activity to help language learners to practice their English through exploring local history using mobile and/or social technology. The target audience are language students who are studying English in the United Kingdom.

The activity will be designed to help the language learners to practice their English in a practical and meaningful way whilst utilising technology to learn about and engage with the local history in the city or country in which they are studying. The design will attempt to enable a dispersed group of language learners to participate together in a social learning and connectivist way to share knowledge and help each other to improve both their English and local history knowledge in a collaborative, relevant , motivating and fun way.

The design will take into account the target audiences’ different levels of English, and their familiarity, or lack of familiarity, with non traditional learning methods. The design will also take into account the target audiences’ varying degrees of familiarity with using social media and the varying levels of time that different participants can spend participating in the activity.