BACK TO PROJECT BASED LEARNING BLOGS
By: Andrew Larson, High School PBL Facilitator
Columbus Signature Academy New Tech High School
Columbus, IN
The disciplines known as Design Thinking and Human-Centered Design have become buzzwords in the world of progressive thought around learning for the last ten years. Though mostly it is designers, architects, urban planners, and computer interface types of folks that do this kind of work, educators also have much to gain from having some HCD tools at their disposal. Way back in 2011 or so I attended a workshop at the New Tech Annual Conference by my friend Drew Schrader about how HCD complement and offer a different lens through which to view Project Based Learning. I was intrigued. I wanted to know more. I wanted to try it. So I did. But, without any training.
An early attempt at Human-Centered Design. Happy with the end product. It is of note, though, that no prototype was developed… that is, the final product WAS the prototype. We do this a lot, don’t we?
It turned out OK. No one was seriously injured as a result of my dabbling in HCD in projects at school with my science and language arts students. A few of the projects I ran with kids were solidly decent. There was a project where we created a “Lego Lab” for my sons’ PBL- based elementary school which was an attempt at using an HCD approach, as well as a couple interesting stabs at designing the next generation of classroom molecular model kids. Nonetheless, each time I tried doing something that I thought might be Human-Centered Design, I felt lost. I knew what the beginning of the project might look like, and the end, but was very unclear about the “messy middle” (does this sound familiar?) in the HCD approach.
Getting some actual training in HCD was of real interest to me. Emily Holmes, a childhood friend and Instagram connection, posts pictures of her work life often and when I saw these post- it note and chart paper covered walls, it instantly reminded me of a Magnify Learning training. People were up, moving, making crazy and rough prototypes of things using popsicle sticks and paper clips. Eventually I asked her what it was that she did, exactly, and she was happy to explain it to me. She trains people all over the world in Design Thinking and HCD with a couple of different organizations, including The LUMA Institute. They define Human-Centered Design as the discipline of developing solutions in the service of people.
In early March, right on the leading edge of the COVID- 19 surge of infection, I attended one of LUMA’s two- day introductory workshops into HCD. It was exciting enough to go to Boston for a professional development opportunity (there was even a pint of peanut butter and chocolate ice cream in my apartment for me when I arrived!) Little did I know just how much impact the training would have on my thinking.
Most notably, what I got from the training was a rich set of tools on how to actually move myself and students through a design process (that messy middle.) In our group of 15, I was the only classroom teacher. I was surrounded by people working in the insurance and healthcare sectors, marketing, the military, and more. I did not feel even remotely out of place, though, because as it turns out, designing for customers and designing for students is not all that different.
LUMA has developed a series of methods akin to the protocols that are the foundation of the Magnify Learning PBL workshops that we do. These methods are strung together into what LUMA called “recipes” for solving problems. The approaches are very flexible and to a large extent, interchangeable. The methods are categorized into three types which I will describe below.
Looking. The first category of methods relates to “Observing the Human Experience” by interacting with and collecting data from other people (customers, perhaps) or a product/object. This includes methods related to conducting interviews with others to gain insight into their needs, seeing firsthand how someone works in a particular environment in order to better know their situations (“Contextual Inquiry”), or, my favorite “Think- Aloud Testing,” wherein a participant or group interacts with a prototype and verbalizes all of their thoughts as they do so.
Literally the first lesson plan that I ran when I got back from my training was a great tool called “What’s on your Radar?”, which is an excellent tool for gaining insight into people’s wants, needs, concerns, wishes, etc.
Students presenting and participating in “Think Aloud Testing.”
It’s really quite funny (for me, anyway) as I recall that the workshop that I went to required me to miss two days of school fairly close to some upcoming presentations by my students (the molecular/ viral models I mentioned earlier.) As I thought about what I really wanted to get from these prototypes that they had developed, it occurred to me that “Think- Aloud Testing” was a perfect presentation format for them to take their models, hand them to a user with just some very basic instructions, and see what happened. So I did another knee- jerk thing, which was to change the format of their presentation altogether to this HCD format. The results were spectacular. These were perhaps some of my very favorite presentations ever. The pressure was totally off the presenters, it was interactive, fun, and most of all, highly informative.
Understanding. The second set of approaches is all about “Analyzing Challenges and Opportunities.” Much of the work here was very much in parallel with Magnify Learning’s work. We used “Affinity Clustering,” virtually identical to the Affinity Mapping protocol that we use in every summer training, but in a slightly different way: as I mentioned earlier, LUMA strings together methods into what it calls “Recipes,” and in our case, we first used the Contextual Inquiry to gather information about a bike sharing system in a certain town and how well it was working. After having completed that method, we took all of our observations and data and categorized them into affinity clusters to see the patterns and big themes.
Another incredible tool was something called the “Importance/ Difficulty Matrix,” which took various solutions that we had brainstormed and sorted them into four quadrants: important + difficult, important + easy, not important + difficult, and not important + easy. This is an awesome way to simply take a bunch of ideas generated by students or participants and make decisions about which solutions are most worth pursuing and developing.
How to make a “Do” Person.
Making. Finally, the most fun of all. These methods are focused on “Envisioning Future Possibilities.” I came to learn quickly that our facilitators, who were brilliant, were also pretty artistic. They taught us a few really simple tricks to sketching and designing that even those that appear hopeless can communicate a few things effectively and with ease.
We used another incredibly powerful brainstorming tool called “Creative Matrix” which is a wonderful form of more structured brainstorming. It relies on categories and specific users to generate more and better ideas than the free- form brainstorm that we defer to. Of note is the fact that this method was followed up, as a part of a recipe, with the “Importance/ Difficulty Matrix” mentioned above.
“Rough and Ready Prototyping” is, by design, quick and dirty. With limited time, the focus automatically goes to functionality and clarity. If the prototype of the app (done in what HCD folks call wireframes) does not make sense or it leads down a blind alley, the user’s experience will quickly reveal those flaws. The experience is powerful and results in future iterations of design that are more productive and informed, leading to better refinements in subsequent versions.
All of these methods, and the collective philosophy of HCD itself, resonated profoundly with me and the potential impact on my students. For one, HCD helps the users become better communicators and listeners as they seek to gain insight about a customer (or community partner, in the context of PBL,) get feedback about work they have generated, or feed off of the energy and experiences of others. The act of affinitizing ideas and naming them fosters critical thinking, as does any approach that asks the developer to “walk in the shoes” of the user. And naturally, the act of accepting and integrating feedback into the improvement of a product, idea, or design is a skill that our students need and are mostly in the process of developing.
I think that HCD and PBL work about as well as the peanut butter and chocolate in that ice cream I was gifted in Boston. Let’s explore this idea further, together.
Andrew Larson is a science facilitator at the Columbus Signature Academy New Tech High School and an experienced Magnify Learning workshop facilitator. He writes for our regularly updated blog about Project Based Learning. When he’s not doing awesome PBL work, you can find him mountain biking, spending time with his family, or digging around in the garden.
SIGN UP TO RECEIVE OUR PROJECT BASED LEARNING BLOGS & RESOURCES!