instructional design

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)

Making art history come to life with “Frieze Tag”

Frieze Tag wireframe - Figures assembled
| Matt McGowan

Created for:

Project length:

  • Short-medium (final two weeks of class, design document).

Team:

  • Matt McGowan (solo project/assignment).

Challenge:

  • Design a learning game; produce a design document that contains a detailed software analysis (or landscape audit), related classroom activities, and a mockup or prototype.

My response to this assignment was a design for a multimedia, augmented-reality learning game/app called “Frieze Tag!”

The full design document can be found here:

“Frieze Tag” design document (pdf)

These are a few screens from the mockup (or rigged-path prototype) I created for the prototype:

And here are some images from the “Klepsydra” segment of the 2004 Summer Olympics Opening Ceremony in Athens:

“Klepsydra” images ref: http://londonclassicstutor.blogspot.com/2012/07/athens-2004-olympic-klepsydra.html

“The Great Mural of Our People” – a MinecraftEdu + Makey-Makey design

Drawing of Stonehenge builders rolling stones
| Matt McGowan

Created for:

Project length:

  • Short (one week, design document).

Team:

  • Matt McGowan (solo project/assignment).

Challenge:

  • Integrate tangible computing into another assignment done during the semester.

I elected to add a tangible element to the design I did for the course’s “Empowering narrative-making in others” assignment earlier in the term–a MinecraftEdu-based project entitled “The Great Mural of Our People” (the text of which is here, for comparison’s sake). Here’s the result of adding Makey-Makey to the mix–wherein students design simple, interactive machines that simulate laborers operating the same machine together:

NARRATIVE AND TANGIBLE COMPUTING – “THE GREAT MURAL OF OUR PEOPLE” (pdf)

image reference: https://farm8.staticalickr.com/7300/10697026416_7bc9c692ef_z.jpg
image reference: http://amitron2001.tripod.com/Mad_fools/topic_4.htm
image reference: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-isle-of-man-12386804

“OPEN: the Journal” – an app designed to help close the word gap

| Matt McGowan

Created for:

  • Digital Media Design for Learning (DMDL) degree; Cognitive Science and Educational Technology I course (Spring 2014).

Project length:

  • Medium-long (approx. last quarter of the term, final group project design document).

Team:

  • Saira Mallick
  • Matt McGowan
    • my principle contributions: “Background,” “Problem Description,” “Delivery Platform” and “Project Narrative.”
  • Ruth Sherman
  • Shalini Shroff

Challenge:

  • As a group, produce a full, thorough design document on a project of mutual interest.

A few years ago, I read Maryanne Wolf’s Proust and the Squid (2007) and was floored to learn (amongst other things) that

[a] prominent [1995] study found that by kindergarten, a gap of 32 million words already separates some children in linguistically impoverished homes from their more stimulated peers. In other words, in some environments the average young middle-class child hears 32 million more spoken words than the young underprivileged child by age five. (p. 20)

In class, I was fortunate to have three other classmates become interested enough in this “word gap” to work on a project together. What we came up with was a mobile application titled “OPEN: the Journal.”

The main goals of this design are to:

  1. promote the sustainability of programs such as the Thirty Million Words Initiative, and
  2. support approaches learned in initial interventions–i.e. engaging in conversations with young children and speaking to children using a larger number and a greater variety of words.

The full design document can be found here:

“OPEN – the Journal” design document