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.)