Storative:
Designing a digital repository platform for a local progressive high school.
City of Bridges High School (CoBHS) is a local progressive high school in Pittsburgh that values project-based learning, student agency, and self-directed learning. As more technology is applied as an educational tool in the current society, CoBHS is facing the challenge of balancing between the efficiency that comes from modern technology and the face-to-face interaction they value in their tight community. One of the core learning experiences at CoBHS is the Personalized Learning Plan (PLP). In the course, Learning Media Design, our team recognized PLPs as an ideal focus for our project. We designed a repository platform that will help the students and teachers leverage existing resources while fostering peer-to-peer learning.
Project Overview
Challenge
City of Bridges High School (CoBHS) is a local progressive high school in Pittsburgh that offers Personalized Learning Plan(PLP), a project-based curriculum that allows students to explore various interests and manage their own learning expereince. Hoping to balance technology implementation and in-person interaction in PLP, we were tasked to observe design opportunities and design a service or platform to improve students' learning experience.
Solution
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Designing a digital repository platform with past PLP projects with three main goals:
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Inspiring students to ideate PLP topics.
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Connecting them to peer mentors and fostering peer-to-peer learning.
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Storing students' project information for later use by themselves, their peers, and their advisors.
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Project Scope
Designing digital repository platform
Role
Lead UX/UI designer
Tools
Figma, UX Research, Prototyping
Duration
4 Months
Team
Tyree Cowell, Xander Fann, Bella Yang
Design Process
Research -> Analyze -> Ideate -> Prototyping
Research
I conducted research to learn about the culture of progressive high schools and the current learning experience.
In order to understand the culture, the stakeholders, and identify potential design opportunities for CoBHS, we conducted initial research on progressive high schools and different methodologies to immerse ourselves in the CoBHS environment. Each phase of our design process was heavily influenced by existing methods in Human-Computer Interaction and Contextual Design. These methods are:
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Conducting Interviews
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Contextual Inquiry
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Cultural (Design) Probes
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Design Synthesis & Problem Framing
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Storyboard Speed Dating
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Experience Mapping & Service Blueprinting
Research Goals
To prepare for the research, we listed down two main goals that will guide our research process.
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Understand instructors' and students' current experience with the PLP curriculum.
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Immerse ourselves in the CoBHS environment to learn about their cultures and atmosphere.
Background Research
City of Bridges High School (CoBHS) is a progressive school in Pittsburgh that values project-based learning, student agency, and self-directed learning. One of the core learning experiences at CoBHS is the Personalized Learning Plan (PLP). Our team recognized PLPs as an ideal focus for our project.
Background Context
What is PLP?
Students can choose their own topics that are interesting to them, set their own goals and milestones, get feedback from mentors on the proposal along the way, and achieve learning deliverables. PLPs vary widely in topic, length, and focus. Each student selects a single faculty mentor to support them throughout the process.
Stakeholders
The main stakeholders of the project are Headrush learning: a digital project management platform that is newly and currently implemented in the CoBHS to help manage PLP curriculum; and the instructors and students of CoBHS.
A learning management platform that CoBHS implemented to help manage PLP projects.
Headrush Learning
A learning management platform that CoBHS implemented to help manage PLP projects.
A local progressive high school focusing on project-based learning.
City of Bridges High School
Instructors & Students
User Interviews on Headrush Learning
Our original design challenge was focused on investigating a new tool that CoBHS is piloting in order to support the documentation of student PLPs. Though we did not end up focusing on Headrush exclusively, our initial interview with Headrush founder, Shane Krukowski, gave us key insights into how documentation might work in a project-based learning environment. Our final synthesis artifact can be seen below.
Contextual Inquiry
To fully immerse our team into the current state of CoBHS, we conducted a contextual inquiry to find out how teachers, students, and administrators are using Headrush Learning to collect, record, and analyze student assessment data. Our goal will be to find opportunities for improvement in these workflows both within and without Headrush. Using a new educational service requires prerequisites of technological capabilities that we want to explore their use in CoBHS. As Headrush is currently in the piloting phase, we want to:
Clarify who the stakeholders are
When and how they are using Headrush
How comfortable they are with the application
How students, teachers, and administrators interact around PLPs
Methods
To accomplish these goals, we visited CoBHS to conduct a contextual inquiry. We created a few case studies for the past, present, and future of PLPs to create initial and ideal journey maps and/or workflows. Here are the three main methods we implemented to conduct our research:
We first spoke with Bret, the PLP advisor, to gain an overarching understanding of the goals and success of the program, as well as how she is using Headrush and other tools to support students.
Method 1
Diving deeper, we observed how students are creating PLP projects and the usage of Headrush throughout the progress.
Method 2
Understanding how the PLPs fit into the student curriculum, we spoke with Randy, the school founder and principal, to understand how Headrush can help him manage everything
Method 3
Insights & Implication
Insight 1:
A disconnect between ideal usage and actual usage of Headrush
There’s a disconnect between the enthusiasm for the platform at the administrative level and the actual usage of the platform by teachers and students.
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Simplify Headrush functionality to reduce steps.
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Highlight important core features of Headrush
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Solidify the current usage of Headrush for PLPs before extending usage to other projects.
Insight 3:
Teachers need support in managing projects
With 60 students and only 3 PLP advisors, teachers sometimes find it hard to keep up with the various needs that students have and monitor all projects’ progress
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Can Headrush brings to the teacher’s attention which projects immediately need attention and prioritize that attention?
Design Implications
Insight 2:
Core benefits of Headrush in conflict with core values of CoBHS
The primary purpose of Headrush is to organize student projects in a systematic way for the teachers to provide feedback. But the culture of CoBHS focused on in-person relationships so they prefer communicating directly.
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Alter Headrush features to be more friendly to the small school size.
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Design Headrush features to foster in-person communication and community interaction.
Insight 4:
Students’ desired features exist in Headrush but aren’t being used
Students want to see examples or their peers’ PLPs. Headrush has the functionality to publish projects for broader consumption, but the only people that can see student projects are the assigned advisors.
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Can projects be made more public in order to provide students with examples that can add inspiration during the PLP process?
Youth Focus Groups
To conduct the focus group research method, we visited CoBHS and conducted a group interview with four students. By holding a discussion about PLP and the student’s learning experience, we gained a more in-depth understanding of students’ perspectives and feelings toward PLP and the usage of Headrush.
Focus Area & Insights
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Understanding students’ perceptions of the PLP process
Focus Area 1
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Students like the freedom and flexibility of PLP.
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Students found it difficult to decide on topics due to the diverse nature of PLP.
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Students struggle with creating their own assessment rubric.
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Students choose their advisors based on preferences or instructors’ fields of expertise.
"When they told me to set my own rubtic, I was kind of surprised because I’m like “ What do I put down?”"
Understanding students’ experience and feelings with Headrush usage for PLP
Focus Area 2
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Students have a mixture of analog and digital workstyle.
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Students find Headrush confusing and non-intuitive.
Students generally avoid using Headrush during their PLP process. -
The last time a student used Headrush was when she set up a project.
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Students think Headrush is more for the instructor.
"No one really likes Headrush."
Understanding students’ future expectations with PLP
Focus Area 3
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Since CoBHS has a small community, students prefer in-person interaction with the instructors rather than receiving feedback on Headrush
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Students don’t really work on their PLP projects outside of class time.
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Students think it’ll be helpful if they can view past projects.
"I don’t need to use Headrush to talk to the teachers because they are always around during PLP time."
Design Probe
To support our design process, we want to collect data from open-ended prompts that are related to our design challenge. The challenge is investigating the use of Headrush as a learning management tool, particularly for PLPs. However, as we have learned from our contextual inquiry, students and teachers aren’t enthusiastic about using Headrush. As a result, we want to get some more information about how students are working on projects, collaborating with teachers and each other, and tracking progress naturally. Additionally, we also want to use our design probe to gain empathy and context surrounding workspaces and work styles. The list below presents a high-level description of the kinds of information we hope to gather.
Objectives
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Logistics and emotions about Headrush
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PLP process and feelings about PLP
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Collaborations/relationships
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Between students
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Between students and teachers
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PLP environment/workspace
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Non-PLP projects Processes Emotions
Design Artifacts
Methods
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Place the design probe artifacts in the middle of the PLP room
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Ask students to draw a random prompt during the week
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The prompt will ask them to take a photo
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After taking the photo, students should respond to the writing prompt on the back of the polaroid photo.
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Finally, students should staple the photo to the prompt card that it goes with and place it in the collection box
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During the week, students are encouraged to look through the box of completed prompts and add reaction stickers to photos based on their feelings
Results & Design Propositions
After gathering the results of the design probes, we used the collected materials to come up with potential design propositions that might be applicable in CoBHS. Here are some examples of the design propositions we ideated:
Mentor/Mentee System
Mentor/Mentee system that allows students with similar project experience to guide and help struggling students.
Built-in Scanner
Built in scanner into table that allows students to quickly scan their work and upload them.
Past PLP Shelf
A section of the bookshelf that contains previous student projects for students to look for inspiration and guidance.
Challenges & Limitations
As we collected the results of our probes, there were only 8 photos in the collection box. We thought the reason behind the low participation is that students did not swap out the films when the polaroid camera is empty after 8 takes.
Therefore, we used the photos we took during the contextual inquiry as supplementary materials when conducting analysis.
The complete materials and ideations can be viewed here.
Analyze
I analyzed the data to uncover trends and patterns in the culture of CoBHS. This process informed my understanding of the challenges and opportunities within personalized education.
Through our investigation of the school and the approach to progressive education, our team gained and synthesized our research into artifacts that captured the main identity of the school using affinity diagrams. Through our artifacts, our team sorted and organized the relationships and opportunities in the PLP process that will allow us to move forward into ideation. A sequence artifact, an identity model, and a relationship artifact model highlighted the intricacies of the high school while maintaining a justification of how well our brief experience in the school allowed us to enhance their learning culture.
Affinity Diagram
Our first step in consolidating our findings was to create an affinity diagram using data from our interviews with Randy and Bret, and our focus group with CoBHS students.
Through this process, we identified three key types of data that led to the creation of our three high-level models.
Our original affinity diagram can be seen below, with different sticky notes indicating different sources of data.
To view the affinity diagram in detail, click here.
Artificats/Models
Sequence Model
PLP Process(journey map)
The PLP process is complicated since it includes iteration and self-reliance on the students. The process is self-defined based on student learning styles. To create a deeper understanding of the process, our team was able to dissect the process and identify gaps and opportunities that the stakeholders struggled with in this arbitrary process. While creating the artifact we attempted to understand the relationship between the student and the teacher as well as trying to learn about the culture within their school.
Click on image to view the model in detail
Click on image to view the model in detail
Relationship Model
Headrush in CoBHS
As our team deciphers the relationships between the stakeholders and how Headrush is integrated into their relationships. From the model, we were able to identify how the types of tasks and processes are managed or isolated from Headrush. Mainly the managerial type of tracking is used through Headrush to keep students on track while emotional and deeper connective processes are mainly done without Headrush.
From a general learning perspective, the current process and student preference are through interactions with educators, while Headrush is being utilized as an additional tool instead of replacing a specific process.
Identity Model
Educator's Bret's Role
This model synthesizes the interviews our team has had with Bret that reveal an understanding of her roles and reactions towards Headrush. It ties together how her teaching philosophy and experience are shaping her reactions. Our team learned from the teacher’s perspective of the pros and cons of the school's setup. Bret recognizes the shortcomings of a time slot that promotes student agency, but also recognizes how students' work is also up to them and wants to maintain a fun motivating environment.
Click on image to view the model in detail
Ideate
How do we balance the use of technology and fostering in-person learning experience?
After collecting data from a wide variety of sources and immersing ourselves in the culture, constraints, and desires of the CoBHS community we began using the insights we gained to generate design solutions. We uncovered the main issue: all users highly value in-person interaction in learning, whis raised the challenge of balancing the use of technology and fostering in-person learning experience. By using design grids, storyboard speed dating, and experience mapping, we finalized our design solution and created a service blueprint to capture how our solution would solve the identified problem and bring value to our stakeholders
Design Grid
" What If " Design Grids
To start brainstorming for design solutions, we first came up with 4 high-level, “how might we…?” questions aimed at improving the PLP process in ways that reflected our data. These questions included:
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How might we better align Headrush with the CoBHS culture?
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How might we better scaffold students in tracking progress on PLPs in a self-directed way that allows for flexibility in work-styles and project types?
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How might we help instructors balance between monitoring student learning progress effectively and maintaining an interactive method of teaching?
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How might we leverage the existing community to introduce peer learning into the PLP process?
Design Artifacts
Next, we rapidly came up with answers to these questions through “what if..” statements. For example, to answer the last question on how to introduce peer learning into the PLP process, we wrote statements like “what if all PLPs were public?”, “what if we put students into peer groups?”, and ‘what if we have a designated check-in date with all the students?”.
Finally, for each HMW question, we categorized our “what if…?” statements along 4 different dimensions:
Context: Places & Spaces
Practices: Routines and Events
Learning Interaction: People in Activity
Physical/Digital: Tools & Materials
The goal of this exercise was to identify where most of our design ideas fit and where we might be ignoring possible design ideas.
Moving forward, we were able to use these ideas in our individual brainstorming activities by combining features/ideas. These ideas fed into our final design concepts, storyboards, and ultimately, our final design solution.
Story Boarding
Now that our team had a wide variety of ideas situated in real-world contexts and aimed at targeting real opportunities, we were ready to consolidate our ideas into a final set to be presented to CoBHS stakeholders for feedback and reactions.
After generating storyboards, we identified 6 main ideas that were the most well-developed and targeted the key opportunities we wanted to address(Click here to view all the storyboards.).
Insights
With our storyboards in hand, we traveled to CoBHS to present our ideas in a quick-round speed dating session. Our storyboards were categorized into two types: for teachers and for students. Depending on who was at our table at a given time, we presented storyboards from either type. The general goal of this process was to get feedback from end-users about their perceived value and interest in each of our design solutions, as well as to modify any existing solutions to better fit the needs of the community.
Our speed dating led to five key insights about the needs, wants, and constraints of the CoBHS community as followed:
Potential value greater in supplementing existing practices rather than creating new ones.
Students and teachers place a high value on peer learning and peer-to-peer interactions.
Teachers and students place a high value on not making things too easy for students).
Tension between teachers’ needs for more structure and students’ desire for flexibility and independence.
PLPs are drastically different and generating design solutions that can support them all is challenging.
Results
The students of City of Bridges High School were most fond of the repository idea where there would be a database of past PLPs for reference due to the low commitment and structure it provides while teachers were most fond of a cheat sheet idea because it allows them to keep track of all the students while also provide commentary on progress.
Experience Map
From the storyboard results, two of the winning ideas are cheat-sheet and repository, with the cheat sheet being more useful for teachers and the repository being more useful for students.
In our original experience map, we attempted to merge the cheat sheet idea and the repository to provide a holistic solution for both students and teachers. However, after some consideration and some feedback, we realized that it may be too complicated to achieve in one-course projects. Because of this we decided to focus mostly on the repository idea while also adding some considerations about how the design might also be useful for teachers.
The following pages provide an overview of our envisioned learning experience using our final design concept: Storative
Overview
Storative is an online repository for storing historical PLPs and inspiring new PLPs. The system is designed to support both students and teachers throughout the PLP process. This experience map presents how Storative can support PLP efforst in three phases:
Phase 1
Inspiration
Phase 2
Connection
Storage
Setting up a PLP
Making Progress on PLP
Phase 3
Storing and Displaying PLP
When students begin a new PLP they can use Storative as inspiration to find a PLP topic or as a resource when identifying milestones and rubric criteria.
Storative can be used to connect them to peer mentors and useful resources. Advisors can also use Storative as a resource to help students
When students finish a PLP, they can upload their project information into Storative for later use by them, their peers, and their advisors.
Experience Map
Prototyping
We created and iterated on prototypes to bring the design concept to life. These prototypes allowed me to test ideas, gather feedback, and refine the platform to ensure it met user needs effectively
Low-Fidelity Prototyping
As we entered into our final stage of design (prototyping), we had a solid idea of the type of system we wanted to create.
First, we collaboratively decided which pages we wanted to build including a home page, a search results page, etc.
Next, we individually designed our own versions of each page, imagining what type of features each might have. Our lo-fi prototypes generated a wide variety of design choices and feature ideas, but we were also able to identify some common themes that helped lead to our final prototype.
Final Prototype
Our final prototype allows users to both browse and search for prospective inspiration for their PLP as well as document their PLP process. It is both straightforward and detailed for users to be able to browse for curiosity and see what is available, as well as do a more detailed search through filters to find more specific details. Uploading a project has all the basic information as well as the ability to sync with Headrush to streamline the process and put an existing tool into use.
Home Page
Features
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Allows users to both do an intentional search and see what projects are part of the repository
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Low commitment process as they are able to quickly look or search for projects
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Split screen display allows for easy adaptation and customization depending on what projects or themes should be highlighted
Search Results Page
Features
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Filters allow users to narrow down what searches they want to see
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Tagging system allows users to categorize and filter projects based on topic
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Advisor filtering allows students to find topics based on expertise
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Liking options allow users to go through multiple projects without commitment
Upload New Project Page
Features
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Uploading has consistency within the information that is able to be seen on project pages
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Seamless importing of headrush material to incentivize Headrush usage
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Public and private options ensure privacy for projects and agency within what they want to share
Project Result Page
Features
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Project pages include all the key components of a PLP
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Progress is shown but limited to ensure documentation, but also only a product of inspiration instead of copying
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Includes the tagging filters to see similar projects as well as other relationships
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A demonstration of learning video or upload shows the final product and accumulation of all project work
Prototype Flow
Home Page
Search Result Page
Project Upload Page
Project Result Page
Future Physical Implementation
CoBHS - PLP Classroom
The digital repository would be accessible on the school computers placed in the PLP classroom of CoBHS. Students can easily browse and search for past PLP projects without login into their personal accounts.
Personal Devices
Since the digital repository is online, students and instructors can also access the repository using their personal devices by login into their accounts. More features will also be available when accessing the repository with an account.
Reflection & Next Steps
Reflection
This project dove deep into an immersive research experience with a progressive high school that returned the effort that we put in. City of Bridges High School has been highly responsive and supportive making the project worthwhile and insightful in a real-world case about supporting learning cultures. Our team recognizes the value of including stakeholders and end-users in the design process right from the beginning. In fact, we spent around two months in the data gathering and research phases. Because of this, we believe that we were able to focus more on designing the right solution before getting into designing the solution right.
Things I would've done differently
If there was more time for us to finish the project, we would've conducted some usability testing for our Figma prototype before proceeding to the final prototype. This way, we can receive feedback and revise our prototype to create a more comprehensive user experience flow with our final prototype.
Next Steps
Future Implementation
Currently, our prototype is a simple Figma mock-up, so a rational next step would be to implement a complete system and run a pilot study at CoBHS. This would allow us to gather more detailed and concrete feedback from our end users and make more fine-grained improvements to our design.
Other Adpatations
In our final presentation demo, we heard from many visitors that a repository tool would be adaptable in many use cases besides City of Bridges High School. Another logical next step would be to see how our design could scale to other educational programs and institutions such as the iDeate program or METALS program at Carnegie Mellon.
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