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Team 2 : Let's get digital

During our first stages a majority of our concept focused around the kits. We knew we wanted to included an online interaction too and started to talk about who we were designing for and what would they want.

After revisiting our  activities (you can read more about in Yana's blog Air Kits) and listening to teachers about what was effective in the classroom we decided we needed a number of different profiles, community, teacher and student. This was our first starting point and we created quick site maps to help  understand content and flows.

Version 1.0 sitemap 

Drawing out the site map and rethinking our persona we decided that there were way too many log in's and remembering another password might be a barrier to engagement. We did not want to add any extra work for Karen as she is busy and currently not engaged with air quality. This resulted in just one log in for the teacher while the rest of the community and the students will have a sub set of the teacher content available to them.

We created goals for the site to help set the tone and understand what we wanted to achieved.

• I am clean and simple
• If I am used in a classroom many can see me at once even if a group is gathered around a laptop
• I can be used on a projector or smart board
• My colour palette is refined, minimum with pops of colour
• Calls to action are limited per page, no confusion please!
• The students are the stars of the show, the focus is them

We iterated on the sitemap and considered where EPA could be used and how to include citizen science data. Once a sitemap was loosely defined we then started to make rough sketches considering the content, layout, context and user goals. We made notes beside sketches on possible interactions and what were primary actions vs secondary.

We also wanted to ensure the online experience and the offline (physical kits) felt contented and helped with the learning and sense making of the data. Using elements from the kits we created a digital representation so there would be familiarity and used it as a tool to introduce other elements about air quality like the EPA stations and data. 

considering users with sitemaps

sketching to understand flows and interactions

After receiving feedback it confirmed our thoughts on the direction we wanted to go, an open site for Karen and the community that would include a map showing areas being monitored by the EPA or the students, a page to view the the work and documentation by the students, a page with helpful homework resources and a page about the program.

The teacher view included additional pages or extra content on the community pages. Items from the teacher view could be shared onto the community view or kept private for just the class. 

After deciding the flows and how the site would scale with additional streams of water, soil and waste  (you can read a bit about the streams on Joes blog)  along with considering the features that may need to be applied as it grows we picked the key pages to develop further for Fridays presentation.

Ideally, and what we really needed to do,was to move the sketches into axure or another wire framing tool to work out all the parts in greater detail but due to time restrictions we jumped into high-fi's in photoshop and created the interactions in keynote. Here is just one example of a page and the interactions we considered.

Understanding data in the classroom, using the catching air experiment to help make EPA data relatable 

The screen based interactions on this project was interesting to work on. Next stop final presentation and promo video.

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Team 2: Kits Kits Kits

We are providing both student and teacher kits that will be run over the academic year with 6th class students. Each student gets their own kit and the activities work with the existing curriculum so can be included in a number of different subjects. Each kit includes a primary air quality activity with other recommended secondary activities. These can be done in school or at home.  

The Kit is designed to be compact, long lasting and easy to use for both the teacher and student. We began by defining the contents and activities. This allowed us to then design the packaging directly for the users and the activities they would be participating in.

The packaging is all about the student and the teachers, keeping things simple and removing any barriers to the learning process.

Each dox is clearly labeled 1, 2, 3 according the stage of the programme. There is a space to write your name and class on the front edge as they will probably be stacked on a communal shelf or placed in personal cubbyholes in the classroom. When you open the box, it stays open and you’re presented with a set of labeled activity boxes, each of which contains everything required for that activity, from instruction cards to equipment

Kit 1 includes the first group of activities. Kit 1 is an introduction to Air Quality and begins to connect Air Quality with visible items through tangible learning and links to the curriculum through Maths, Science, Art and Geography.

Catching Air (Main Air Quality activity)

Student writes their name on the back of the card

Smear vaseline on the square of the card

Hang up outside in the school grounds

Record the location

Examine one or two weeks later

Compare different areas

Paper Pinwheel

Helps to understand air by making it visible

Lichen Spray

Long term project to be run over the year. Involves monitoring lichen growth in different areas and recoding its progress.

Data Paint

To begin visualising data based on pollutant values

Kit 2, Manipulating Data - NOx Diffusion tubes (Main Air Quality activity)

Sourced the diffusion tubes through the mapping for change project in the Barbican Centre.

• Place around the school grounds - opportunity to bring home

• Collect 2-3 weeks later and send for analysis

• Visualise and share results when received

Kit 3, Going Beyond the School Gates - Electronic AQ sensor (Main Air Quality activity)

We built a simple, low cost, low energy, PM & Temp Sensor which downloads readings to SD Card

Similar to diffusion tubes but with recommended take home period

Upload and share the data as a class

We spoke to some teachers we know as well as those who are studying at NCAD. They provided great insights into how the children might respond to different tasks as well as how to make the kit more attractive to them as teachers. A key insight here was, rather than expecting the teacher to become familiar with the activity before running it with the class just give them a script to read from in the teacher’s kit. 

We ran the Catching Air activity from Kit 1 with a group of 6th class students in St Catherines Down national school. This allowed us to test eek with both the teacher and students.

School Trip Video (Awaiting confirmation)

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This is EEK's promotion video. Enjoy!

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Team 2: EEK Kit Contents

Pack 1:

Pack 1, the first pack that the students receive, includes activities and fun experiments that eases and slowly introduces the students to Air Quality. This is the pack that we decided to concentrate on and develop the most. Along with all the packs comes a website that the students can log their activities and collections to share with their parents and the rest of the community. This pack contains:

• Catching Air Activity: vaseline and card (main activity) where the students spread some vaseline on the card and hang it outside in various locations around the school/ home. After a few days they inspect the cards for particulate matter they may have collected.
• Paper Pinwheel Activity: paper pinwheel with its arm and leg that need to be assembled. This helps understand air by making it visible.
• Lichen Spray
• Data Paint: visualising data by using paint. Introduction to data.
• Instruction Cards: each pack contains instruction cards that the students will use as a step-by-step guide for the activities.

Pack 1

Pack 2:

I won't go into a lot of detail in this pack or the third pack. The main activity in the second pack are the NOx Air Quality Monitoring tubes that the students can leave around the school/ home to collect NOx samples. This will lead to a brief introduction about the EPA and also an opportunity to start mapping the area for the rest of the community to see. Other activities that might be included would link to the previous pack, for example, documentation of the growing lichen.

Pack 2

Pack 3:

The third pack is the final pack, received during the third school term after having completed the previous two. This is a more advanced pack and it contains sensors that the students can use at school/ home to collect data. This will be further linked into the EPA and data collection. It carries on previous activities by making them more advanced. 

Pack 3

After finishing the 3 packs, after getting feedback from teachers, we decided to not have a reward system. The teachers that we spoke to already had their own reward systems within the class/ school. We are considering various end-of-year exhibitions, showcasing student's work, individual certificates that the students might get and some prizes given out on Sport's Day for best project etc.

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Team 2: Teacher Reviews of the Kit

After figuring out the pack contents we got a group of Primary and Secondary school teachers to come in and review the pack and the idea of our service. We got some really great feedback on how this could be rolled out into schools and also what kind of engagement the students might have, whether they would want to engage with this at all. Our chat with the teachers reinforced our selection of the 5th/ 6th class age group.

Meanwhile we also arranged to go to a local school to speak to a 6th class teacher and to run the Vaseline and card/ jar activity with the class. 

We divided ourselves up: 3 people would run the activity with a group of students and one person would be filming. We prepared a pack for each of us to take. Each pack contained vaseline, jars, card and string. 

The teacher introduced the activity to the class by asking what they thought the phrase "a breath of fresh air" meant. The way we ran the activity was we got each student to put their names on their card/ jar and tie a piece of string on the card. We then went outside into 3 different areas of the school playground and here the students put vaseline on their cards and jars. They then found a spot to hang the cards and place the jars, noting down their locations. The children were all curious as to what we were doing and why, and some of them, surprisingly enough, knew a lot about air quality already.

We are hoping to go back to the school before our final presentation to get the cards back and see if they collected any data. Overall both the students and teacher enjoyed the activity. It did not take up too much time and it was great for us to see it in a real life context.

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Team 2: Air Kits

Louise started drawing out and thinking about the contents of the 3 air packs. Things she considered were how they tie into the primary school 5th and 6th class curriculum, the learning outcomes of the activities within the packs, what the activities are themselves, what the teacher pack contains and what skills the students would develop after completing each pack.

Some companies that have had success implementing similar ideas into schools across the country, that we looked into are Food Dude, Innocent Smoothies and Science.ie. We got a really good idea how to structure our company and who would fund it, basically going through the design blueprint and company bio.

Afterwards we looked at the packs in more detail and made a decision to focus on the first pack and the main activity of the second and third packs. We were then able to make some prototypes of what the contents of that pack might look like, the boxes that they came in etc.

Student pack

Teacher pack

We then started to research kit packaging to get an idea of how our kits might look like. We got some great inspiration on Pinterest as well as other companies who did similar things. Packaging is still a work in progress.

Alongside the packaging, Joe was looking into the brand side of things. By the end of the day we all liked the idea of creating a little character that the children can refer to and we named our product Eek. Details are still to be gone over but thats all I can say for now :)

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Team 2 : Branding our eek

Concept

For our product we wanted to establish a strong brand style that reflected the values and core concept. We started with the initial style of purple and grey to represent the entire eek company. For the streams we wanted to use primary colours of Yellow for Air, Red for Soil, Green for Waste and Blue for water.

We created a brand style tile which you can see here so that all members of the team can apply to any part of the product that they are working on.

  

Eek - The octopus

After some research in to existing educational platforms and schemes it was obvious that a character was effective in delivering the message and kids could relate to it. We focused on an Octopus as main character as we felt it shared some of our key values. Some interesting facts about Octopuses;

• Octopuses are considered the most intelligent of all invertebrates.
• As active predators they need to explore, understand and remember their environment and the behaviour of other animals.
• Studies have shown that octopuses learn easily, including learning by observation of another octopus.
• They are the first invertebrates to be seen using tools, such as using coconut shells to hide from potential predators and using rocks and jets of water in a way that could be classified as tool use.

We really felt these represented and reflected our projects goal and concepts. After some sketching eek our octopus was born..

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Team 2: Defining the Concept

Over the weekend and on Monday our group decided to spend some time working apart. We thought this might help generate individual ideas. We then came together later on in the day for a catch up and shared our ideas. By doing this we saw that we all had a similar idea in mind of what our concept was. At this point, after presenting 3 slightly different concepts on Friday, it was still hard for us to decide which one to go with or what parts to use from each one. By breaking apart, it helped us to decide what we wanted as individuals, which then informed the rest of the group.

By that point we also got some feedback from Emma. Things for us to consider in our concept are which age range of school children are we aiming to design for, who sponsors or implements this project, what are the digital/ physical touchpoints, is this implemented in the home/ community and how etc.

Primary school being the main focus, maybe incorporating TY or the Junior Certificate students, we were able to narrow down who it is we are designing for. We then split up some work we could do like look into existing programmes within primary schools like Food Dude, contact a school where we could possibly do some user testing, do a Service Design Blueprint, details of the Packs and wire framing the digital touchpoints. The rest of the day was spent carrying out each tasks and trying to get as much done as possible.

This is a rough Service Blueprint that myself and Pag made to give us an idea of how the project works. Its not an easy job blueprinting something that you're still not sure of!

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Team 2: Concept Presentation

After our week of concept generation we presented, in our teams, our concept areas to members from the EPA, Intel and Dublin City Council. Each team had one concept area, generated through insights from the first two weeks of research, and presented three concepts within that area.

Each group then had time for feedback after each concept area. All panel members provided great suggestions which we captured afterwards as a group and sorted into four categories.

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Team 2: Brainstorming Concepts

On Thursday our team started the day off by trying to come up with some problem statements around our chosen persona which was Karen. Karen has 2 kids, Jack and Jill who are in primary school and might be the reason Karen would want to contribute to good Air Quality. We cam up with some problem statements and they were good but we still weren't getting to what our exact problem was and therefore didn't know what solution we needed. 

We also as a group couldn't decide on what area to focus on. We choose to do the Service area, maybe focusing on schools, or the community or the town/ city, which was very broad. Because we struggled deciding the area to zoom in on, it made it difficult for us to find out problem and then the solutions.

Joe found the Stanford D School 'How Might We' Method and we tried to use that to frame our problem. After some time of trying to use this method, we reached a dead end. It wasn't something that worked with this particular project and we couldn't get very far into framing what our problem was because it was still too broad.

At this point it was almost noon and we still didn't know what we wanted to do and were beginning to panic. We came up with an Action - Target - Location way of hopefully narrowing our problem. 

Action: Create awareness

Target: People choices (Karen & family)

Location: Within a school

This really really helped us and we managed to narrow down our problem and target to a few simple words. After this we started to explore our possible concepts within the school area, with Karen, Jack and Jill in mind.

At the end of the day we came up with 3 different concepts which are still very loose and rough but the possibly the start of something great.

Pass the Parcel

Pass the parce is based around the idea that the schools get sent an Air Package that contains a sensor, a small journal where the kids get to record their experiences with the sensor. This package is passed around schools. On the box there might be the names of the different schools receiving this package. The purpose of this is to teach the pupils about air quality in a fun way, maybe getting a turn each to measure their journey to school or else their trip to the park at the weekend. This might be part of something bigger, linking back to the community and town and to the rest of the country, a way of discovering the land.

Aeir Chairde

Aeir Chairde is about a little creature that the kids have to take care of by contributing to good air quality. A sensor collecting air data is placed somewhere outside of the school. The creature reacts to the air outside.. If there is a lot of pollution outside it's sad and might not grow as fast so the kids might have to walk to school or somehow contribute to good air quality to make it happier. The creature sends the kids messages and they can also view the air data somewhere inside the school.

Airssemble

Airssemble is a DIY kit that the children can make themselves. There might be some easy tools inside like a cup lined with vaseline to collect PM particles. A link to a video would show them how to assemble the kit. They might also be able to get add ons, sort of like lego, and collect other parts to add to their kits.

We will be presenting our concepts on Friday afternoon. 

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Team 2: Initial Concept development & Getting out in the wild

Overview

As a newly formed team of 4 people - Yana, Louise, Joe & Paget we were ready to tackle Education & Awareness using a service design approach. We quickly outlined some initial tasks for the day which we hoped would help reach our goal of defining our problem.

Defining the Problem

We used a technique called, 'Frame your design challenge' to help the group identify our main problem statement. This also gave each member of the team the opportunity to talk through how they saw the problem being resolved.

As we drew out each aspect of the story it was clear there were some common themes and ideas but also very different solutions arising.

Writing out the Scenario

The next activity we approached was for each of the team to tell a story of how they saw the product/solution helping a persona in their day to day. This activity of storytelling was to help the team verbalise some potential solutions.

Again the most common theme emerging at this early stage was that we wanted to send our personas on a hunt or to discover the sensors around the country. An early stage idea of a treasure hunt was emerging. This was also identifying some key touch points for the group - an app, website, book for users, etc

Out in the Wild

As the theme of a treasure hunt was emerging we took the opportunity to get out in the wild and validate some of the questions we were initially posing:

• Would people engage with an activity in an outdoor space?
• Would people feel a reward is necessary after completing an activity?
• Would informing people of Air quality as users engage be a positive way to make data meaningful?
• How intrigued or curious would the general public be if they were to see something unusual in a public space

Outcomes

As a group we found the exercises of the day to be very fruitful in some early research. Our key takeaways at the end of the day were:

• We need to agree and narrow our focus on one key user group.
• We need to formalise the problem statement that we are tackling.
• We need to identify the key location or intervention point which would yield best results.

Our in the wild testing showed:

• People are happy and willing to engage when in a crowd
• People are slower to engage in a activity that involves other people (us as stars!)
• People expect some level of reward but are happy to take part if it has a competitive edge

Onwards to Thursday where we hope to address these concerns and build on our concept.