design thinking

Bloxels for 4th graders–game design thinking

Design (Thinking) Process
| Matt McGowan

[Taught: 2017-18 school year to the present]

Using an app-based game-creation platform called Bloxels, I tasked 4th graders with making the most fun game they could–for an audience of their classmates, the wider school community, and anyone playing in the the Bloxels Arcade.(1)

Students worked in small groups, framing their efforts with design thinking, a highly human-centered process that emphasizes imagining (or empathizing with) users’ experiences, creative problem-solving, and swift iteration. Within each group, students took primary responsibility for one of three roles: Character Designer, Layout Designer, or Story & Theme Designer.

  • Student interview for the “Empathize” phase of the process.
  • Sticky-note organizing for the “Ideate & Brainstorm” phase.
  • A first draft level design by one project’s Layout Designer
  • Another project’s Character Designer starts to experiment with animation
  • Some original art from the student game, “Fire and Ice”
  • A helpful turtle explains the Hero’s quest in the student game, “The World of Toppings”
  • An NPC offers a warning in the student game, “Pollutionville Pummel”
  • Some contemporary commentary from the student game, “The Journey of Super Milo”

(1) The games students shared to the Bloxels Arcade contained no personally identifying information.

Computational thinking with Fox Makes Friends

| Matt McGowan

During the 2019-2020 school year, in their Technology classes Nursery 4 (N4) and Kindergarten students worked on a project designed to expose them to some fundamental concepts of “computational thinking”—namely, decomposition (breaking down bigger tasks into more bite-sized pieces) and sequencing (putting a series of steps in order).

Using the book Fox Makes Friends as inspiration, students followed a recipe, of sorts, in order to (like Fox does in the book) ”make” friends—to construct pretend friends alongside real friends, their classmates.

Using a variety of craft supplies, N4 students created two-dimensional “friends,” while kindergarteners worked in three dimensions.

“When Fox wants someone to play with, he takes his Mom’s advice and sets off to make a friend. What happens along the way surprises him! Fox is about to make the best friends he could ever hope for, but not in the way he imagined.”

Image and text reference: https://www.scholastic.com/teachers/books/fox-makes-friends-by-adam-relf/

Teaching design at the AMNH… with POV Mad Libs!

| Matt McGowan

During a Game/Mobile Design internship at the American Museum of Natural History (Fall 2014) I worked on a program called “The Neanderthal Next Door,” which was

a 27-session youth program for 21 12th-graders that’s designed to develop and implement a digitally augmented (augmented reality-enhanced) print activity guide that explores the topic of human evolution through the frame of Neanderthals.

The piece of the program I worked on the most was developing a design-thinking approach that would guide the 12th-graders in their work. Given the time we had with the students, I thought an approach that used a selection of Stanford d.school’s Bootcamp Bootleg cards would work best. Below is a post about a few of the sessions that the program’s director, Barry Joseph, asked me to write for his blog, mooshme.org:

“‘PEOPLE NEED A CHANGE IN LIGHTING BECAUSE THEY WALK TO THE RIGHT’ – USING DESIGN-BASED LEARNING WITH MUSEUM TEENS”

Instructor facilitating POV Madlibs for high school students
The POV Mad Libs discussion – lead by the program’s Science Educator, Marissa Gamliel.

One of the many shuffles I did of d.school's Bootcamp Bootleg deck.
One of the many shuffles I did of d.school’s Bootcamp Bootleg deck.

And here’s an earlier part of the program curriculum focused on design (using the Bootcamp Bootleg deck):

d-school cards for sessions 9-16 (pdf)