At Your Pace: Revolutionising Childhood Education
At Your Pace is an educational tool that involves 5 interactive Tangible User Interface (TUI) “pucks” for children and a Dashboard for educators.Our shared vision was to revolutionise childhood education with a digital innovation that “edutains” - educates and entertains, children in a classroom environment with the goal of helping them learn in a lively, engaging manner while empowering educators and parents to support the children’s learning progress, growth and development.
Role:
Skills:
Background and Motivation
Problem Space
Social media is known to have a negative impact on learners’ mental wellbeing, by fostering unhealthy habits of competition, addiction, and self-loathing, among others.
How can we design a product that provides an alternative to this, which encourages healthy and interactive learning for children?
How can educators and parents be empowered to use these tools to understand their children’s learning journeys?​
Interview data was collated and analysis using Braun and Clarke's thematic analysis approach. From there, five central themes emerged.
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Solution
We designed a digital solution that involves Tangible User Interfaces (TUIs) and a Dashboard for educators and parents.
We wanted to make something that would avoid tearing young children away from the physical world so our TUI “pucks” are designed to be safe, toy-like, comfortable to use.
This multi-sensory learning experience tool gathers data on students’ learning progress, learning styles and overall wellbeing in the classroom. Educators and parents can access the data on the Dashboard for the purposes of enhancing classroom education and understanding the children better.
Research Questions
What are the specific communication challenges faced by staff and students in universities?
How can GPT-based systems be designed to address those challenges effectively and what are some of the benefits and drawbacks of these systems?
What are the key factors and features of the chatbot system that contribute to the successful adoption and implementation of GPT-based communication systems in universities?
Research Process
For the interviews, 2 students and 1 staff member were recruited. This was chosen for the initial stage to be able to gather rich data about the challenges faced from two different perspectives from the main stakeholder groups in the university.
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Each participant was carefully recruited through the Purposive Sampling method. This widely-acknowledged method in qualitative research was chosen for its potential to stragetically select individuals with information-rich backgrounds, a willingness to share desired information, optimise limited resources and gather rich data.
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For the co-design workshop, 6 university students were recruited.
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The expert evaluation was carried out with one expert in the industry.
Phase 1: Semi-structured interviews
First, a series of qualitative interviews was carried out with both students and staff members, representing the two main stakeholder groups in the university. Each interview lasted about 45 to 60 mminutes and garnered rich views and insights into the perspectives from students and staff member. the participants spoke of their struggles in terms of either retrieving or disseminating information within the university and shared their opinions of Artificially intelligent tools as a potential solution. ​
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Interview data was collated and analysis using Braun and Clarke's thematic analysis approach. From there, five central themes emerged.
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Personas
from the interview data, three semi-fictional personas were created - Curious Keiko, Anxious Alex and Supportvive Sarah. All three are meant to represent users who might potentially find an AI tool useful in addressing their pain points.
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The personas are used in the co-design workshop as a prompt for discussion among participants and as a starting point to emphatise with users before ideating the chatbot prototype.
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Phase 2: Co-Design Workshop
The co-design workshop was carried out... ​
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90 minutes. 6 participants.
2 activities: emphatiing with personas and then sketching.
Summary of Research Process
Conclusion