PROTOTYPE
SESSION 11
Dear Edu Hero, you have reached the step the children get most excited about- the Do. However, in the design thinking framework, the children are enabled to take a pause, experiment their ideas and refine them at an early stage before the final implementation occurs. Watch the video to understand the idea of prototyping in a very simple way. |
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Hook
The warm up exercise is called one hand paper planes. Easy, right? But there’s a catch. The paper airplanes can only be built with one hand. Get the students to work in groups. Everyone then raises their dominant hand (the hand you use for writing). Now, everyone puts that hand behind their back and is forbidden to use it for the activity.
Each group then has two minutes to work together and build a paper airplane that will compete in a contest to see whose plane can fly the furthest. Give the students ample papers so that they can try and test different kind of plains. After two minutes, have each group compete. Generally, the group that built multiple prototypes performs better.
Get the groups to do three rounds of testing and competing. You will find that students are learning about whats working well and what isn’t, and constantly applying it to their plane designs. This can be a great hook to explain the relevance of prototyping.
The warm up exercise is called one hand paper planes. Easy, right? But there’s a catch. The paper airplanes can only be built with one hand. Get the students to work in groups. Everyone then raises their dominant hand (the hand you use for writing). Now, everyone puts that hand behind their back and is forbidden to use it for the activity.
Each group then has two minutes to work together and build a paper airplane that will compete in a contest to see whose plane can fly the furthest. Give the students ample papers so that they can try and test different kind of plains. After two minutes, have each group compete. Generally, the group that built multiple prototypes performs better.
Get the groups to do three rounds of testing and competing. You will find that students are learning about whats working well and what isn’t, and constantly applying it to their plane designs. This can be a great hook to explain the relevance of prototyping.
Reconnect
Getting the children to revisit their final ideas from the brainstorming activity is a great way to get the students to reconnect to the real challenge.
Prototyping is the art of showing instead of telling. In the next step, divide the students in groups based on different parts of the final solution and get them to build a rough model of the solution. The model is nothing but a visual representation of what the concept should look or feel like.
How to Prototype?
Once the students have built their model and shared it with the whole class, there are a few ways to go forward-
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Watch the video to see how students solved the challenge of small changes by continuously testing and refining their solutions.
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Refining Solution as per the User Need While seeking feedback from the user, lead the children to focus the feedback on user experience and not on the solution. Let the students to plan feedback questions beforehand so that they lead to constructive feedback and encourage participants to build on your idea. Here are some guiding questions below:
It will be a great strategy to lead the students to identify the hotspots and bright spots in their prototype. This will enable them to identify which ideas are working, which need to be refined or even abandoned. Use the workbook to get the students to cluster the feedback as per the 3-2-1 rule. Another way of clustering the learning is to get the students to share the feedback on sticky notes, and cluster it in three categories- positives, concerns and suggestions. |
Lead the students to think how meaningful are the solutions to the user and have they been able to address the real root cause. Once the groups have identified the areas of improvement, get them to refine their ideas for the final solution.
Close the session by leading the children to reflect on their prototyping experience and its application into other areas of their life.
Close the session by leading the children to reflect on their prototyping experience and its application into other areas of their life.