Glitch

[ezcol_1half]

Jul – Aug 2016

[/ezcol_1half]

[ezcol_1half_end]

User Research, UX/UI Design

[/ezcol_1half_end]

Glitch aims to help middle and high school students continue exploring their creative interests while having fun and succeeding academically by combining art and science education into one fun, social app. In Glitch, users get to learn about circuits and programmability while exploring their creative side by making fun animations with musical accompaniment, thus learning to think creatively and musically and having fun with peers while making educational use of their time.

You can see our Medium-Fi Prototype on Marvel.

This project was completed on WorldLab summer Institution – Designing for Solving Global Grand Challenges, under the instruction of Professor James Landay and Ge Wang.

More information about our project is here.

Process

Need finding

In China, students prepare throughout middle and high school for the Gao Kao, a single exam that determines the university they attend, or whether they can attend a university at all. Thus, as they get older, they need to spend more and more time studying.

First, our team had a casual conversation about our educational experience and compared the difference in China and U.S. Most Chinese students struggle with exams and have little freedom their own interest. Meanwhile U.S students complain that their education system does not facilitate to lay a solid foundation.

We interviewed more than 16 students and parents to learn about their opinions on creative learning. Participants are visitors from all over China and campus students. We were also lucky to visit Tsinghua Lifelong Learning Lab and interviewed some students and parents there. TULLL is an innovative lab for developing children’s creativity. They were having a programming course that taught Secondary school students to learn Python by Minecraft.

We completed the interview in Peking University, Tsinghua University and Tsinghua Lifelong Learning Lab.

Problem Statement

Students’ resulting lack of free time and energy is not beneficial for their creativity development, which in turn often leads to college students not knowing what they are passionate about and making an uninformed decision when choosing a major and career path. Moreover, for the sake of exam preparation, efficiency (such as memorization techniques) is often valued over fun and innovation, which further discourages students from thinking creatively.

Point of View

We selected three points that gave us insights.

Ideation — HMW… and Brainstorming

How Might We …? is an effective way to generate ideas. We asked questions in HMW responding to the three POVs and then picked one HMW of each POV and started Brainstorming.

From POV to HMW

From hmw to solutions

Finally we chose the idea that designing a creative app that combines Science and Art together to learn more effectively.

Prototype and Test

Experience Prototype

We invited our teams and visitors in PKU to complete experience prototyping with us. The key point of EP is the experience and scenario but not the product.

Our team is doing experience prototype of an AR painting app

Experience Prototype of an co-painting app

Visitors in PKU is doing experience prototype of an AR painting app

Low-Fi Prototype

According to the feedback of EP, we chose one of the solution – a creative app that utilizes knowledge of circuit to generate photo filters, and made Low-fi prototype to test.

Low-fi prototype version 1-3

We tested low-fi prototype on some high school students and got feedback that the interface was a bit confusing, the mapping was not so clear, they needed more tutorials, and so forth.

Iteration

We refined our design and tested again, the feedback became much more positive.

Refined the low-fi prototype, circuit and photo filter mapping

Medium-Fi Prototype

We designed UI&UX and completed the interaction on Marvel and refined it based on Heuristic Evaluation from other teams.

Medium-Fi Prototype, more on Marvel

Presentation

We made the final presentation both at SCPKU in PKU and at d.school in Stanford.

Glitch Poster

Password 111

Team Poker face; Ilene and I at SCPKU and Stanford

Thank to my teammates, Tommy Fang, Ilene E, Alex Yang, TA Jane, and Professor Landay and Ge.