Week 1

In Week 1 it was important for us to establish ourselves as a team. We took time to get settled into our room and began to discuss the framework of our project! After establishing clear roles we had time to begin the brainstorming process. We worked together to create a composition box to get us going.

During the brainstorming process we looked at some project inspirations:

  • Favorite art activities for children?
  • Visual representatives of student’s achievements
  • Existing badging system @ Elizabeth Forward School District (EFSD)
  • Puzzles
  • Jam – O – Drum Projector based interactions
  • Embodied Learning Lab @ Elizabeth Forward School District
  • Create your own Avatar experiences
  • Paper Dolls
  • Covered Bridges from the local area
  • SMALLabs
  • Hands on “Maker” Spaces

Many of our inspirations came from local spaces within the Elizabeth Forward and Carmichael School Districts as well as past ETC projects that worked with the EFSD. We had completed a lot of research not just about educational technology programs but also simply what EFSD was already doing and drew a lot of inspiration from our client.

We talked about experiences that we might want our project to include:

  • Discover children’s passion
  • Parents play with students?
  • Self Directed Learning
  • Parents Experience
  • Active Learning
  • Celebration Moments, celebrate achievements with the whole class!
  • Personalized tailored experience
  • Customize own badges
  • Extra Curriculars: sports, art, dance, music, etc.
  • VR/AR Experiences
  • Get Conversation going about badges b/w students
  • Get parents engaged with their kids
    • Conversations
    • Involvement
  • Each child can create their own creatures and avatars depending on the visual environment the teacher provides
  • Embodied Learning
    • Use of movement

Last but certainly not least we discussed needs of the project:

  • How to celebrate children’s achievements?
  • How to motivate children?
  • Unlock different levels of experience
  • Entertainment
  • How can this carry over into the future?
    • Can this stay with students after kindergarten?
  • Want students to have “voice & choice”
  • Education/Learning
  • Bringing Imagination
  • Cooperative
  • Parents engagement

We enjoyed kicking our project off with a week of research and brainstorming but no week 1 is complete without a team dinner!

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