BC Tech Ecosystem Visualization
Microsoft
An interactive data visualization platform that tell the story of the evolution of BC tech space.
research
Data Visualization
Interaction Design
prototyping
Albert Einstein said it best. 'If you want your children to be smart, tell them stories. If you want them to be brilliant, tell them more stories.' Digitales is a creative outlet for children (aged 6–7 years old) to unlock their imagination and turn wacky ideas into brilliant stories through facilitated story structures while having fun.
Albert Einstein said it best. 'If you want your children to be smart, tell them stories. If you want them to be brilliant, tell them more stories.' Digitales is a creative outlet for children (aged 6–7 years old) to unlock their imagination and turn wacky ideas into brilliant stories through facilitated story structures while having fun.
Product Designer
& Scrum Master
Product Designer
Product Designer
Project Manager
& Video Editor
Developer
Developer
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Albert Einstein said it best. 'If you want your children to be smart, tell them stories. If you want them to be brilliant, tell them more stories.' Digitales is a creative outlet for children (aged 6–7 years old) to unlock their imagination and turn wacky ideas into brilliant stories through facilitated story structures while having fun.
Storytelling is a cognitive development tool that help “elicit children's thoughts, identify their distortions, and help them to more accurately make sense of their world”(Friedberg, 1994, p. 216). Through research, we found that most traditional learning methods have failed to adapt to the widespread uptake of virtual learning.
A story is comprised of 3 segments: beginning, middle, and end. Learners not only can kick start their own story but also add a new story segment to someone else's story.
Given the age-related ethical research guidelines, the team was unable to reach out to any children. Alternatively, we conducted interviews with 8 subject matter experts to understand the learning process of children.
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Most 6–7-year-olds are already reading and sharing stories. Therefore, it is important to provide a progressive learning experience to achieve a strong understanding of authoring their own stories.
The educators emphasized children should lead their own educational experience rather than instructed in a controlling way so learners feeling a sense of ownership.
Dr.Shinas mentioned that word-image visualization can help to provide a digital latent learning experience for children that utilizes progressive learning.
With the idea of crafting a creative storytelling experience in mind. The team researched existing products with storytelling elements in the market.
How might we help young learners tell a story without writing any actual words?
How might we gamify the learning experience to achieve latent learning?
How might we craft a collaborative learning experience for young learners?
From conducting statistical research, we decided to design on mobile to reach a greater number of target users.
According to MediaSmarts, nearly 49% of students in Grade 4, some are as young as 8 years-old, have access to their own phone or someone else’s phone on a regular basis (MediaSmarts & Brisson-Boivin, 2018).
This statistic helped arrive at the decision to design on mobile so younger children can play the game using their parent’s phone, whereas older children can use their own phone to play under the monitor of parental controls.
According to MediaSmarts, nearly 49% of students in Grade 4, some are as young as 8 years-old, have access to their own phone or someone else’s phone on a regular basis (MediaSmarts & Brisson-Boivin, 2018).
This statistic helped arrive at the decision to design on mobile so younger children can play the game using their parent’s phone, whereas older children can use their own phone to play under the monitor of parental controls.
The simple interface design guides children with clear and specific bite-size instructions to helps prevent errors and reduce cognitive load.
We want to make children the “protagonist” and give the ability to make decisions within the game.
Enabling learners to engage in their surroundings and giving them space to collaborate with and learn from their peers.
Receiving rewards motivates users to engage with the app while learning.
The simple interface design guides children with clear and specific bite-size instructions to helps prevent errors and reduce cognitive load.
We want to make children the “protagonist” and give the ability to make decisions within the game.
Enabling learners to engage in their surroundings and giving them space to collaborate with and learn from their peers.
Receiving rewards motivates users to continue playing while learning.
"A picture is worth a thousand words". We want to encourage children to tell creative stories using images and child-friendly GIFs. By telling stories through multimedia, learners can develop skills in critical thinking, writing, research, and boost creativity.
Children come across new vocabulary in their daily life. Often, they are highly unlikely to look up words that they don’t understand. So, we built a word-image visualization feature powered by the Optical Character Recognition technology to help them learn new words in their space by simply scanning using a smartphone.
Children can depict a creative story through co-authoring with their peers. We are inspired by an improvisation technique “Yes, and…” that encourages acceptance of the contributions added by others and builds on the previous story. They can play with peers to create a story with the structure: beginning, middle, and end.
"A picture is worth a thousand words". We want to encourage children to tell creative stories using images and child-friendly GIFs. By telling stories through multimedia, learners can develop skills in critical thinking, writing, research, and boost creativity.
Children come across new vocabulary in their daily life. Often, they are highly unlikely to look up words that they don’t understand. So, we built a word-image visualization feature powered by the Optical Character Recognition technology to help them learn new words in their space by simply scanning using a smartphone.
Children can depict a creative story through co-authoring with their peers. We are inspired by an improvisation technique “Yes, and…” that encourages acceptance of the contributions added by others and builds on the previous story. They can play with peers to create a story with the structure: beginning, middle, and end.
"A picture is worth a thousand words". We want to encourage children to tell creative stories using images and child-friendly GIFs. By telling stories through multimedia, learners can develop skills in critical thinking, writing, research, and boost creativity.
Children come across new vocabulary in their daily life. Often, they are highly unlikely to look up words that they don’t understand. So, we built a word-image visualization feature powered by the Optical Character Recognition technology to help them learn new words in their space by simply scanning using a smartphone.
Children can depict a creative story through co-authoring with their peers. We are inspired by an improvisation technique “Yes, and…” that encourages acceptance of the contributions added by others and builds on the previous story. They can play with peers to create a story with the structure: beginning, middle, and end.
We conducted both moderated and unmoderated usability testing with a total of 19 participants including educators, EdTech experts, and our fellow grad students. Both types of test were key to collecting both unbiased and constructive feedback which validated design decisions, features, and overall user flow.
The team witnessed respondents struggled to understand each item in the navigation bar. They commented the use of icons and the meaning of the item were not intuitive and representative.
We redesigned a set of icons that better represents the meaning of each item on the navigation bar.
EdTech experts are concerned regarding allowing children to upload multimedia items might risk their privacy and safety and violating intellectual property in the online community.
We pivoted to remove the ability to upload multimedia items and decided to provide a child-friendly GIF library called DigiGIFS, alongside DigiPix.
We added parental controls, guest names, and avatar displays for any information that would be featured on the online community to protect the privacy and safety of young users.
During the user testing, most respondents had trouble understanding the purpose of selecting questions, upload items and picking a story template.
We decided to redesign the user flow of creating story and streamline the process to make it simpler and clearer. We also created a modal that provides further instructions to help children to learn more about storytelling.
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In the final prototype, there is the ability to view fun facts about DigiPix items. However, by providing definitions for each Collection item, Digitales would be more EdTech friendly and schools would be more inclined to implement the application.
Providing different levels which enabled complex storytelling structures would expand the targeted age range. For this, they would also need to incorporate a more complex rating system so users could get tailored feedback.
To further incentivize gameplay, giving users the ability to trade their DigiPix collection would increase user interaction. This will require privacy considerations if the trading goes beyond their friendship circle.
I am honoured to be working on this challenging yet meaningful project and be a part of this amazing team. Thinking back to the start of the project, I felt directionless because there are so many great offerings in many directions. Being able to dial down on a specific idea and test one idea at a time had led me and the team out of the seemingly puzzling maze. Lastly, I’m content with the direction we are heading toward Digitales and fascinated by the potential for this game.
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An e-commerce ad network that connecting brands with eCommerce stores to promote products
