My original plan was to create three rooms: one for painting, one for dancing/music, and one for photography (using the video/picture blocks). I ended up with only two rooms, as those rooms were a lot harder to design than I anticipated! I wanted to incorporate both text and audio recordings because I know that most children in this age-range cannot read fluently, but they are starting to learn through visual and auditory stories. Coordinating the audio and text broadcasts took a lot of time and focus, but I am excited that I finally understand how to use the broadcasting blocks. I have some existing experience with Scratch, but this project took a lot of time to work through and debug. I used an existing Scratch project as a model for my painting room (I will paste the link in the comments because I cannot embed it here). I looked at their program and incorporated a lot of the same sequences to make my drawing portion of the game work. Thank you to the person who created that program!

     I play-tested this project with two first-grader girls, who were my former students from when I was a teacher in Concord, MA. Through this experience, I found out  that typing was too hard for this age group. The "yes" and "no" was a good level for them, but in one of the possible scenarios they needed to type "Yes I am sure" or "I changed my mind." The typing took them a long time and they weren't prepared to type that much. They might have also gotten confused by how the question was asked. I changed the answer choices to "yes" or "no" for simplicity. 

This did give me some ideas for how typing skills could be incorporated and strengthened by a creative free-draw/music game. Maybe I will use that idea in the future.

     Something I noticed when they were playing was that I needed to fix the dancing room. When the instruments appeared on the screen, the student started clicking them right away and they missed the rest of the auditory directions because they were distracted by the music. I fixed this by making the visual and auditory instructions appear before the instruments came out, as to not distract the player. When I showed this to a peer in class, they gave me very helpful feedback about the “goal” of the game. He said that he was expecting some sort of signal to stop playing or switch rooms, based on whether or not he had accomplished what he was supposed to in that area of the game. When I was designing the game, I thought children would enjoy the open-ended nature of the game. But now I think it would be helpful to include some suggested goals, as children might not understand what they are supposed to do and they might not feel a sense of accomplishment when playing a game without clear goals.

     
      When I was reviewing examples of existing simulations, I noticed that there were a lot of science and math examples but not many simulations related to reading/ELA. This made me wonder how I could create an immersive story-telling simulation for young children to improve literacy and language skills. decided to create a “choose your own adventure” storytelling simulation, and I used Dr. Suess's, “Horton Hears a Who” as an example story. This idea was inspired by the original "Choose Your Own Adventure Series," which I used to read when I was younger. I enjoyed the feeling of autonomy these books generated, and I would reread and replay through each book until I had read it from every perspective. This made me wonder if I could create a digital version with animation and character voice-overs included.

     In this simulation, children are situated in a digital story from a second-person perspective that allows them to experience the story from the view point of multiple characters. Children will move through the story from the perspective of each character and make decisions that affect the outcomes in the story. Children can play through the story multiple times from the perspectives of different characters, and make  different choices to control the direction of the story. This is beneficial because young children learn many important skills through dramatic play and story retelling. By “acting out” or reimagining the stories they read, they build literacy skills and social-emotional skills like perspective-taking and conflict-resolution. 

     I used Miro to create a storyboard of my simulation. I think this medium helped me demonstrate the flow of the story, and the multiple potential outcomes in each story. I think this storyboard also helped me imagine the steps that would be necessary to build this interactive experience, which could be helpful if I were to actually design this. I wish I had spent more time creating the images of each potential outcome, but I didn’t want to sink too much time into the drawing for a low-fi prototype. But I do think that having more images would enhance the storyboard.

     During the class critique, I noticed that I might not have been thinking about simulation in the same ways as my classmates. My project isn’t a model of a realistic situation, but it is a model of an imaginary literary situation. I got helpful feedback to consider how my project uses the affordances of simulations, such as allowing the user to tinker/experiment with different outcomes in a low-stakes environment. Some peers also wondered if the project could be improved by adding more customizable features, or allowing the child to write their own story. This made me wonder if this story-telling model could be used to create more realistic simulations for children to practice solving problems they face regularly. I think this could be beneficial for social emotional learning and executive function skill building. 

     Students will collaborate on a video conferencing software to program and build a robot based on a design prompt. Students will be paired and placed in a virtual environment that is experiencing some sort of problem that could be solved by robots. Students work together to negotiate how to address the problem, how to assemble their robot, and how to program their robot to reach a solution to the problem in the prompt. Examples could include creating robots to clean hazardous waste spills, explore deep-sea territory, or plant seeds to repopulate deforested areas.

     My choice to create a virtual robotics program was inspired by the very challenging experience of teaching elementary and middle school computer science remotely during Covid. In a normal school year, students work in pairs to program and build robots to solve various challenges. But because of the quarantine, students picked up their robotics kits from the school and worked in isolation at home. I believe collaboration is an essential skill to build in any subject, and this experience made me wonder how to design collaborative STEM activities for remote learning.

     Students could engage virtually on a video-conferencing software such as Zoom. Students would be presented with a design challenge that includes some visuals (as pictured below), and they would work on a live collaborative programming file, which might be a combination of something like Scratch and Google Docs. Each student would have their own robotics kit at home so they could still tinker with a physical robot, but they would need to construct a robot that is similar to their partner's. Students could download the code from their collaborative project and upload it to the robot (similar to LEGO robotics kits or Arduino).

      The next layer of ambiguity came when we needed to settle on a problem statement to explore for the semester. All three of us knew we were passionate about early childhood education but had pretty different backgrounds and interests related to EC. I am a former EC teacher and I am really interested in how technology can be used with young children; Lauren is a former psychology researcher and had a lot of interest in how adults can be supported in EC work; Branda is a former researcher who also does a lot of UX/UI design. So we had to figure out a problem we wanted to solve in the EC space with all of those interests in mind… There were a ton of ways we could have gone with this, and I think my biggest growth in this ambiguous space was to try something new and surrender some control around having my ideas chosen. I leaned into the ambiguity of a new topic (Lauren’s idea) around supporting adults as they work with young children. But even when we had settled on that, we still needed to find an area to have an impact and agree that there was indeed a problem in that space.

       I was able to bring my technology idea into the project at this point, and I suggested doing a project around helping adults support young children as they use technology. Even though we all agreed to think about this problem, it was really difficult to prove that there actually was a problem in this domain… We looked through a lot of developmental research, but it was surprisingly difficult to find reliable data about early childhood technology use. The primary things we found were around screen time concerns, which tended to have a lot of unwarranted claims about childhood obesity, ADHD issues, antisocial behaviors, etc. But we wanted to make a project about how EC tech use could be positive, and it was really hard to find research to support that! In some ways, this form of ambiguity helped us realize that this is important work since there isn’t a huge amount of research/literature available on the subject. We also had to continuously reshape our problem statement and theory of change as we did user interviews and field expert interviews. Each interview would illuminate another dimension of concern around EC tech use, and it was sometimes a challenge to resist the urge to create a project around a deficit model of early childhood technology use. Overall, I learned a ton from this project/course. It was extremely time-consuming and intellectually challenging, but I think I made huge improvements in my collaborative abilities. I think our project turned out great, but I am most proud of how I grew to be a better teammate out of the challenges presented by ambiguity.

       So based on those experiences, here is my metaphor… Ambiguity is like a giant corn maze because you are never sure exactly where you are when you are inside of it.  Some things look familiar when you pass them again (some broken corn stalks or popcorn on the ground that a child left behind), but most of the time, it is pretty difficult to figure out if you have been in that part of the corn maze or not. You do not see how all of the avenues connect until you finish the maze and are able to look at the overhead map on the billboard. But even after you have done that, you could still re-enter the maze (or ambiguity) and get lost again!

Also, I am from Illinois, so I am super familiar with corn mazes - they are everywhere! I included a picture of a corn maze for those of you who are not from the Midwest...

     My teammates, Kris, JJ, and Steve, have known each other for a few years and worked closely together in their Ed L.D. program. I wanted to join this group because I recognized similarities in our work ethics and interests. At first, I was a little worried that I wouldn’t have very much to offer the group, since they knew each other well and had already developed many projects together. But that concern was quickly dissolved, as I recognized that I brought valuable and new insight/experiences to the table. I was a teacher for 5 years (a tech specialist/CS teacher/IT member for 3 of those years), so I have been able to contribute a lot of practical insight on how our ideas might play out in a real classroom setting. Kris and JJ have been superintendents (and teachers for a few years), and Steve has worked in EdTech product development/consulting for many years. These different experiences and perspectives have helped us develop a well-rounded project idea that considers the many stakeholders in EdTech products (students, teachers, school leaders, developers, investors, etc). These different perspectives DID mean a lot of back-and-forth/friendly argument about what we were designing, but I appreciated everyone’s directness and investment in creating a great project.

     I think our team handled the role distribution pretty well, although there was a lot of overlap in who was doing what role. I did the major organizational tasks, Steve did almost all of the programming, and then the rest of the responsibilities were divvied up between all of us. Because our product has 5 phases, we decided to assign a point-person to each phase. I think this was helpful in some ways - everyone knew what phase they were responsible for and it made the distribution of work pretty equitable. This strategy did have some drawbacks - primarily that our 5 phases are very interconnected and some parts of a particular phase couldn’t be developed until something had been created for the preceding phase. I’m not sure if I would distribute the work differently if we were to start over - we will see if the product looks/feels consistent in our presentation! 

     This student interview also helped me remember how much I love working with students and being in the classroom. The transition from teaching/interacting with students in a classroom everyday to being around HGSE adults all day has been both exciting and jolting. These moments make me realize how much I miss meaningful connections with young people (from teaching), and the tradeoffs of working only with adults. I have had this feeling multiple times throughout the year, and I have interpreted it as a signal that I should return back to K12 schools and continue to work directly with students. I am in the LDIT (Learning Design, Innovation, and Technology) program, and I think a lot of my courses, peers, and career workshops articulate subtle biases against those who graduate from the program and work as teachers, rather than as EdTech professionals. This has made me feel somewhat isolated/lonely in the program, as I love teaching students directly and that passion motivated me to pursue a Master’s Degree at HGSE. So I have been especially appreciative of the user testing opportunities in all of my projects at HGSE, and I have taken it upon myself to reconnect with former students & teaching colleagues, and spend as much time in the classroom as possible. I think it is ironic that a lot of designers and K12 EdTech developers don’t like user testing - that has been my favorite part!  

I think my favorite experience of this class was learning how to communicate with individuals in various sectors/domains. I learned enough about programming and design to talk about relevant ideas and goals with my team members, while staying true to my academic/classroom experiences that drive my EdTech interests. As I mentioned in a previous blog post, I also learned that I want to return to schools rather than working in a private EdTech company. The user testing was my favorite part, and that was really illuminating for me. I would much rather use products with students to help children learn than design products with a bunch of adults. I believe it is equally (if not more) important to learn what I do not want to do, and I learned that I really miss children when I am working only with adults. 

I definitely advanced my personal learning goals, as I think I continued to build my collaboration skills to work well on this project team. Even though I was not our team’s programmer, I also learned a lot of HTML skills from the programming labs. For me, this demystified programming for me - I always thought it was a domain that was really challenging and I felt like I missed the boat on learning to program. I learned that it is not as hard as I thought it was, and that I can actually learn it pretty quickly whenever/if I decide to do so. But like I mentioned before, I realized I would probably not be happy as a programmer who does not work with children. Designing for children is not enough for me - I really enjoy directly interacting with them and watching them learn. I am also really happy with the project team I picked, and I think this gets at my goal to establish professional connections with classmates who will be helpful in the future. My teammates have been really helpful in their ability to give me advice and guidance, and I am sure I will continue to learn from them in future years.