Bloom
passion and curiosity-driven learning concept
PERCEPTUAL AND COGNITIVE HUMAN FACTORS | Spring 2017
Tools used: Sketch, Principle, Adobe Creative Suite
Everyone learns differently.
We also interviewed elementary school children and teachers to ask about their relationships with each other. Some of the main concerns included student shyness, distraction, and lack of overall communication between students and teachers.
The purpose of our survey was primarily to get a general sense of how students and teachers felt about their current school experience.
“I have trouble asking for help sometimes.”
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Nathan | Elementary School Student
Exploring various concepts pertaining to learning and education through broad affinitization provided us with a general focus of teacher-student transparency, personalized
education, and student emotional intelligence.
We also conducted secondary research in addition to our primary research. Below is a summary of our main findings.
From our secondary and primary research, we came up with a few key insights:
Having a system be tailored to individualized student interests, passions, and goals should be the basis of a personalized learning experience.
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Encourage and gamify talking, helping, and working with other students to foster strong social skills at an early age.
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The current school system has very little emphasis on fostering emotional intelligence, so we should consider creating a way that allows students to input how they are feeling.
From here, we decided to narrow down our project direction to four main aspects:
Shelby Madison is Marshall’s third grade teacher. As a young and enthusiastic woman passionate about igniting curiosity in her students from a young age, her main goals are to communicate with her students effectively and improve the classroom experience with technology.
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Teresa Cole wants nothing more than for her son Marshall to succeed in school and be happy at the same time. She knows that Marshall is an intelligent child but has trouble focusing in the classroom sometimes.
As Marshall goes through school, his main difficulties are his struggles focusing and his need for help on schoolwork at home.
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Shelby goes through her school day wanting to check up on every student who is struggling, but finds that many of them are too shy to actively approach her for help and guidance.
After creating an initial prototype, we tested some iterations with elementary school children in order to test the simplicity of the general navigation. Based on the results, we increased the font size, added back buttons to all screens, and made the icons/cards larger for a more child-friendly interface.
Working on Bloom was an enriching experience that taught me a lot about both the process of designing a system for a larger scale and synthesizing research. I am realizing more and more that there is a low chance to find a solution that will fix everyone’s problem. The best direction to take while designing a solution is not to try to fix everyone’s problems, but to provide people with options to target their individual needs.
Thank you for taking the time to read through this project!
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“Education is the passport to the future, for tomorrow begins for those who prepare for today.” -- Malcom X
Why?
“I would like to be someone who [students] can go to outside of academic-related issues.”
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Cyril | Teacher
We asked questions pertaining to student-teacher communication, enthusiasm to learn, and interest in technological implementation to enhance the learning experience.
Curiosity and creativity are what drive true educational interest and accomplishment.
Studies show that emotional intelligence (EQ) is crucial to a child’s healthy development.
Allowing different methods of assignments and question-answering encourages curiosity and prevents limitation of creative energy.
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Many businesses practice the 20% rule, which dictates for employees to spend at least 20% of their time at work actively ideating and brainstorming.
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A 2010 survey of over 1500 business CEOs stated that creativity is valued as the most important business skill in the modern world.
Being able to identify and talk about one’s feelings (happy v.s sad, angry v.s anxious, etc) is a sign of high emotional intelligence.
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EQ can be taught and fostered by talking, listening, and encouraging. Learning to get along well with peers also aids the development of EQ.
Matching students with teachers based on their individual learning styles and personalities
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A career + future search
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A research and study assistant
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A feeling and confidence level tracker.
The current public education system employs a “one size fits all” model for learning. Students all have varying learning styles, personalities, social skills, and comfort levels; however, most schools do not implement anything to distinguish different learning styles for students or teaching methods for teachers.
Bloom is an education assistant concept for elementary schools focusing on a curiosity-driven learning experience, student-teacher communication, and emotional intelligence.
The world around us is growing rapidly.
The current model of our public education system was designed during the Industrial Revolution; the world we live in now is completely different and entirely new sets of skills are required for our future to best adapt to emerging markets, technologies, and systems. However, all students learn differently and have different areas of interest. Personalized, passion-based classroom environments that adequately foster these types of mindsets and skills might equip our future generations with the skills to create our future world.
Who?
Elementary school teachers and students.
We decided to focus primarily on elementary schools while creating Bloom so that students would gain exposure to emotional intelligence, social skills, and strong communication at an early age. These same principles could be adjusted and scaled to higher grade levels as well.
What?
Giving every student a way to unlock their true potential and passion in school through increased communication, emotional support, and transparency between students and teachers.
Bloom is an education assistant for elementary school students and teachers aimed to augment the learning and teaching experience. Read further to view our process and methodologies we utilized throughout the conception of Bloom.
The learner first takes a quiz days before school starts to help Bloom understand more about them. The questions range from asking the student about learning styles to personality to personal confidence.
The home screen of Bloom adapts to wherever the student is located (a classroom, sports practice, home, etc). Questions are able to be answered in a variety of ways so different types of learners are not boxed to only type of answer input.
This is a list of the student’s classes, where the student could input their confidence level (Learning, Uncertain, Confident, Neutral) and learning percentage. Each class card would include information about the teacher, classmates, confidence achievement badges, participation, collaboration, and career points.
If a student has a question at home while studying, the “help” button will connect them to an available teacher for guidance via chat or call.
Bloom features a "My Mood" screen, which features the ability to input a daily mood or confidence level that would be relayed to their teachers on a daily basis. There would also be a button to connect the student to a listener if they were feeling stressed, worried, or wanted general emotional support from someone. The main purpose of these functions is to develop healthy emotional intelligence (EQ) in children from a young age so they can practice healthy feeling communication skills.
Also located in the Mood screen is the student’s personal “Virtual Garden.” This was an additional way to gamify encouraging the development of EQ and social skills within students. Each student would have a unique “virtual plant” and is encouraged to fill up their garden by collecting other students’ plants. One can help, collaborate, and communicate with someone in order to collect their plant.
Process
Bloom was created over 10 weeks in my Perceptual and Cognitive Human Factors class. In this class, we were challenged to understand and design based on various visual and cognitive factors of the human brain. As someone passionate about individualized services and experiences, my team chose to focus on creating a concept that would benefit the state of the current public education system.
Jenn Lee
UX Design
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Delivered:
Primary research, secondary research, low-fi wireframes, journey maps, prototype, illustrations, video
Team
Joe Kennedy
UX Design
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Delivered:
Primary research, secondary research, low-fi wireframes, hi-fi screens, personas, prototype, video
Tools: Sketch, Invision, Principle, Framer, Adobe Creative Suite
Primary Research
Affinitization
Interviews
Surveys
Secondary Research
Key Insights
Concept Direction
Personas and Journeys
Visual Process
Usability Testing
Navigation
Takeaways