Engineering 4 Health - Highschool Challenge 2
We had our second Engineering 4 Health Challenge at UVic yesterday and it was another success! Some great students who participated and some really fantastic ideas that were generated. The topic for this challenge was the same — use the OLPC (One laptop per Child) as the design platform for creating health applications for students in developing countries. One project was focusing on engaging the whole family in their health through the OLPC and the other was a health oriented game that provided health education in the form of game challenges. Really interesting approaches.
The paper storyboarding design for the event seems to be quite manageable and has generated some good results. We managed to squeeze it into a 1/2 day.
We started by having a group brainstorming session - timed, with two facilitators. Facilitators helped clarify ideas from the participants and encouraged students to speak out their ideas, often using one initial idea “build a game” to create several specific ideas about games. On of our facilitators (not me!) started concept mapping ideas, to show the linkages.
Students were then broken into small groups and encouraged to choose and idea. The small groups (4-5 students plus 2-3 facilitators) often found as they selected ideas, they not only drew out more detail, but some also merged several ideas into one package.
The next step for the students was to begin to work out the details of the design and a high level flow. We did this with the students through paper prototyping and pasting together a high level storyboard on 4′x6′ paper. We used paper mock-ups of the OLPC laptops (below) so the students could draw their rough screen sketches on them and describe some of the functional activities on the pages. This really helped quickly make ideas real and also was accessible to students — some focused more on GUI design and others more on functional description.
All the individual pictures were placed on the paper with arrows used to denote typical screen flows for users. Not everything was on the storyboard, obviously. Many of the ideas they had were quite complex and would require a fair amount of content, but the pages really did give a good idea about how the systems might work, following along a specific scenario or giving an overview of the path of a game.
At the end of the morning, each group was able to present their idea to the rest of the students.
I definitely enjoyed this project and wanted to thank all the students, volunteers, faculty, staff and teachers who made this happen.
