The Pseudo-End

To begin with, I should explain that I'm not ending my time with Pearson quite yet. KidsTeam ends in a few weeks (for this academic year anyway) and I figured it was worth it to stick around for those extra few weeks (which are going to be quite intense KidsTeam sessions as we attempt to squeeze in as much as possible before the summer hiatus.) Plus, not all of the sticky notes are sorted yet!
There's also a good chance that I'll be participating in the KidsTeam week-long summer session this June, so my involvement with Pearson will be lasting a little longer. I might continue with the occasional post when we do something exciting, so feel free to check back at any time for future updates. :)

Second of all, do you remember the email newsletter that I designed, that then got sent to the graphic design team (who decided on the image to the left)? Last week, I got to meet one of the people in charge of that design team! She talked to me about Pearson's design restrictions (including fonts, colors, and heading types), which I had no idea were so specific, and about the 6 elements on page technique and complimented my design (which was exceedingly nice). And my one of my mentors brought up my fancy lettering again. (I swear it all comes back to the fancy lettering...)


And now for a few thoughts on my internship overall (or so far, I suppose):
These past several weeks, I've gotten to work with eight fantastic kids and an equal number of wonderful adults on a manner of all sorts of creative and fun activities whose information will help better educational products. I've learned about how users get to (and could better) be able to inform the design of products they will eventually use, and the best way to work with children users to accomplish these tasks. I've gotten to learn a touch of graphic design and ponder the impacts of child-adult power dynamics and how they specifically impact children's creativity and willingness to collaborate with adults. I've seen how even very small changes can alter a user's experience significantly. In short, I've been able to learn about psychology, design, and children while getting to exercise my creativity in a way that will have tangible impacts on technological products, and all while having a fair amount of fun and a real-world experience. It's been a great time. And that's why I'm glad it's not quite over yet. :)

Colors & Choices

I do agree that this is vibrant though. 

First off, the favorite of the lovely commenters seems to be the color palette for the teletubbies, which I found interesting, because that particular color palette was actually not popular in KidsTeam. The favorite color palette of KidsTeam happened to be Sesame Street follwed closely by Secret Agent Oso, and hence those two color schemes were what the app's color scheme will be.
So I guess that just seems to show the wide disparity two small groups can have with color
preferences.

On to the next order of busines: a sticky note update. Whatever happened to all those sticky notes I was writing? Did I ever finish writing them all? The answer. finally, is yes.
So what will become of the massive pile of colorful sticky notes you ask? They are to be painstakingly sorted and categorized.

Others of you are probably wondering something along the lines of the wonderful Mr. Peacher: "I am still wondering about that pile of sticky notes. While all of the ideas cannot be as fabulous as magical spaghetti, how do you decide what ideas are usable?"
The answer is it depends on what project we were reseaching/helping/designing for that particular session.


The sticky notes in all their glory.

For example, we had a program team come in recently with some designs and wanted feedback. (Remember the clickable frogs and draggable apples people?) KidsTeam critiqued their designs and told them which styles and colors they liked and whether everything made sense. In particular, KidsTeam really didn't like certain items that were being used in these problems: a thimble and a set of chattering teeth. These just seemed like very strange items to have in problems for kids. Why weren't they something more normal, like strawberries or bouncy balls? Of course, KidsTeam also had a whole host of other suggestions as well.
The product team then took that information and decided what they could feasibily change with the time and monetary limitations they had. They changed the background color. They went with the cuter style design. And they got rid of the thimble and chattering teeth. They couldn't really change much else though. What they decided to change after participating in the KidsTeam session was up to them.


The beginning of the sorting madness.

And that's the normal process if a product team (other the voacbulary app KidsTeam has been working on for months) comes in for a session.
For the vocabulary app, it's more involved.
There's a literacy expert to start, who helps put limits on what kids can and should be learning from this app. There was a focus group of young children to help all the KidsTeam members get a better idea of who the intended audience actually is. In short, the app is going to be much, much simpler than most of the fun crazy ideas. There won't be aliens or helicopter cars or salt shakers full of glitter. Which is a shame.
But there is hope for the magical spagetti!
If the extremely simple version of the app is sucessful when it is eventually released, there may be harder and more complex versions that eventaually follow with some of the fun ideas like bedrooms that turn into candy and balloon races in the sky.
So at this point, it's not eliminating any ideas, per se. It's tabling fun ideas fot possible future use and simplifying the themes of KidsTeam ideas into their basic form. So, for instance, this version will probably have fun interactions as well, it will just be jumping on the bed instead of the whole room turning into a disco party.
Did the color choices of KidsTeam surprise you? Is the lack of magical spagetti in the first app just too disappointing?

Color Palettes and Prototypes

My original version.

The finalized version.

Remember that email newsletter for Kids Team I made a while ago? Well, my design got sent to the graphic design department and the final product that will go out to the parents is complete (it's the lovely picture to the right).
I think it's interesting to see what the graphic design team decided to keep from the original (like the light bulb and the spotlight idea - just with a magnifying glass instead of a spotlight).

But back to the vocabulary app for children that Kids Team has been working on since September...
It's finally been sent to the art department for prototype development!
So when the art department asked us what art style and color palette we wanted we naturally decided to include the kids. Because that's what we do in Kids Team, after all.
We took color palettes from children's television shows and assessed them all very quickly, coming up with words to describe them and picking our favorites. Here are some of the color palettes we used (they happen to come from the Magic School Bus, Oso, Toy Story, Teletubbies, Bob the Builder, and Sesame Street). Which color palette is your favorite, what are some words you associate with it, and what shows do you think each color palette came from?

Clickable Frogs and Sticky Note Highlights

Usually children fall into one of two roles in the creative design process: as a tester (who only comes in and tests the usability of prototypes) or as co-design partners (where they work alongside adult design partners to create a product - like our Kids Team usually does), and never the two shall meet. Except, apparently, when determining if frogs and apples are clickable.
Last week, a couple of people working on a different product at Pearson came to Kids Team wanting honest feedback and improvement suggestions on their prototypes from the Kids Team kids. (Including if the frogs and apples in their prototypes looked clickable.)
This put the Kids Team planners in a strange, new situation; we were somehow going to have to incorporate the testing purpose into the Kids Team co-design format and method. The solution: let each group (especially the kids, as they had yet to see the actual prototypes) design their own ideas first, and then inform them that this team did the process all wrong by doing the prototypes first. Then let everyone critique the existing prototypes. And for the first time at Kids Team, the adults were told to let the kids do almost all of the talking.
This was unusual, because normally the idea is idea collaboration - the mixing of ideas between adults and children to co-design. But not this time. It was a hybrid co-design tester method, and it seemed to give the product team the information they wanted, so mission success!

Meanwhile, I've been continuing to write each Kids Team idea on sticky notes, and some highlights:
- magical spaghetti
- a Christmas audio speaker
- green slime
- a super villain that pops out of a chicken egg
- getting to throw snowballs at an alligator (as a reward)
The Christmas audio speaker and the green slime had no context - I have no idea what prompted them, but I love the idea of a stout Santa reading a story aloud or green slime randomly descending from the ceiling. And no matter how random throwing snowballs at an alligator happens to be, I for some reason agree that that would be an entertaining award in an animated game.

Also, some of the comments from people who have passed by my cubicle and seen the sticky notes:
- "If a tornado ever comes through here, you're screwed." (I quite agree random person I do not know. I quite agree.)
- "Gonna have to call the sticky note police - you're killing 2-3 trees a day." (I apologize to any trees I have harmed in the writing of these sticky notes. Trust me, I would not be doing this tedious task if I was told there was a better method.)

Post-its and Pearson

So this week was week 2 of spring break for Kids Team, which means I instead focused on something else that I am working on for my internship: collecting, organizing, and analyzing all of the ideas Kids Team has ever produced.
Kids Team has been having weekly meetings on Wednesday since September of this school year, and has created many ideas (mainly for a specific vocabulary app, but a little bit for various people along the way). I have been going through each of the documents from each session and writing each individual idea on a post-it note.

After I am done writing all of the ideas out on post-it notes, I am going to sort grouping similar ideas together, and seeing what kind of ideas and groups occur from this categorization (this technique is known as affinity diagramming).
Of course, I color-coded this process. Each month got a different color, which proceeds in rainbow order, to see if any patterns emerge. The gray post-its are organization and management notes - all of the various things the adults have learned about how Kids Team should be run. And yes, I have only gotten through yellow so far, which should give you an extent of the sheer volume of ideas produced, as well as how much I still have to do, even before the sorting process begins.

Also, due to Navya's comment last week: "I know it's rather late to ask this question, but I realized I'm not entirely sure. What exactly is Pearson and Kids Team? Is this a school or a day care or something like that?" I realized I hadn't ever properly explained what Pearson and Kids Team was, so I'd thought I'd clarify a little:

Pearson is an educational company - they make lots of learning tools for K-12 students, including textbooks, ebooks, and learning apps. Kids Team is a codesign process they introduced last September in order to allow children to design with adults on technology meant for children. In particular, a larger portion of Kids Team so far has been spent on creating a vocabulary app for young children. Kids Team allows the eight children to be equal creative design partners, and they have been involved in the whole process, from the initial idea of the app until now (when the prototype is being developed).

I'm sorry for any uncertainty or misconceptions anyone had about what Pearson or Kids Team is. Please don't hesitate to ask any questions if anything remains unclear!

Arizona SciTech Festival

Hello everyone!
So yesterday (Friday, March 13th) was the Arizona SciTech Festival, where I helped (with four of the Kids Team children and several of the adult Kids Team members) to operate the Kids Team booth, complete with media
videos of Kids Team, a station for showing a Kids Team technique called Layered Elaboration (where transparent sheets are put one on top of the other as other people modify ideas), and a prize wheel (prizes included hex bugs, little flashlights, magnifying glasses, and stickers).
Besides us, there were lots of cool booths to visit; there was a 3D printer, an alligator, a petting zoo, robot fighting, a photo booth, karate people teaching children how to break boards, rockets, a man making balloon animals, a guy making ice cream with liquid nitrogen (he was really popular as you might imagine), and lots of other things. The liquid nitrogen guy also put on a little display of what
liquid nitrogen can do, which was fun. Among other things, he froze (and then shattered) a plastic ball, made a fog machine, and, of course, made ice cream.

This was one of the rockets I saw yesterday: we were all very curious as to how the maker managed to construct the top cone out of the Pringles can...

And remember that Kids Team sign I drew for decoration? Well, apparently it was a little too good because I now seem to be the go-to person for artsy signage:

This is what I get for liking fancy letters.

Serious Play

The newsletter, in all its glory.

First off, I just wanted to show you all part of the email newsletter I designed (which I was essentially told to "make pretty"), because it is finally done and I am a tad too proud of it. Also, if anyone ever needs to make an email newsletter, I highly recommend using Microsoft publisher if you have it - it's lovely.

Now on to more serious matters, or rather, Lego Serious Play.
I had never heard of this technique until a week ago and the name is the first thing that struck me: yes, it's oxymoronic, but, yes, it does sum up the idea of the technique. Lego Serious Play is essentially using legos help people more effectively explain, show, and discover their feelings about certain things, usually through metaphors.
In fact, the whole idea revolves around metaphors and abstract thinking and tends to work very well with adults. But we were trying to use Lego Serious Play to get the Kids Team children to show and describe specific feelings.
Which was a little more difficult.
The children didn't really like the idea of using legos to build metaphors for feelings. They wanted to build something more exciting, like robots or motorcycles.
But overall, the children were better at Lego Serious Play than many of us expected.

The next two weeks are spring break for Kids Team, so I apoligize ahead of time for any possible lulls in discoing animals and random rainbows. Although, we are putting on a booth at a SciTech festival next Friday and half of the children will be there, so that should be exciting.

Anyway, hope you all have a lovely week!