Project – Tools for Teaching Approaching a design process from different perspectives
The goal of this project was to design a tool to help a teacher ‘orchestrate’ his class. Though this concrete defined objective first seemed like a limitation to me, now I think that it stimulated me to approach this subject from a lot of different perspectives.
Our product, ekk Bounce, tries to help young children to share toys, instead of start an argument about it. It is based on the dutch game ‘eitje ketsen’; each pupil has an ‘ekk’. If they want the same toy, they bounce their ekks against each other. The intelligent system then decides who can play, or that the children should play together. a
“All in all a very good outcome of your first project, adequately covering a lot of different competences…” “Your project was successful in it’s two primary objectives. First, you created a concept and prototype that properly addresses the project brief. Second, you used the project to practice a lot of different competencies, most noticeably user focus and perspective and integrating technology. The descriptive modeling (the description from the system side, instead of the user side) might have been better, though.”b
J.B.O.S. Martens, coach
I studied the perspective of the user during an observation at a primary school as a representative of our project group. Thanks to a workshop which was included in the project, I learned to observe effectively by setting a goal for the observation and a strategy. As a group we got useful inspiration from this activity.
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Another competence where I made a lot of growth thanks to the project is Integrating Technology. At the start of the semester I had zero knowledge about coding. By creating the electronical part of the prototypes, I learned step by step how to solder and create a simple program to control an Arduino and a RFID-reader. As well I learned to use of good documentation to work more efficiently.
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Our presentation for the demo days was well-prepared and showed clearly the idea and its context. An aspect of the communication that can be improved is the visual illustration of our project, especially in the report.
“The argumentation of why and how your concept addresses the design brief could be stronger, as could be the description and illustration of your concept (using diagrams, video, etc.)”
J.B.O.S. Martens, coach
The working atmosphere in our group was really good. At first I had some difficulties, because I pay attention to different things than the other group members Pol, Daan and Wouter. I learned to better deal with that and my tendency of perfectionism. This resulted in a good workflow.
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