Design Technology Encourages Reading

Written by: CDT4C Students in a collaborative team

Our Design Technology class has been given a challenge by Ms. Durrant to use design thinking to solve a problem for the 7th grade students. This challenge requires us to work in teams and design a solution for the client’s problem. Our class was divided into four different teams, all trying to figure out how to make reading fun and enjoyable for the 7th grade students. Each team has designed different solutions that will help the students. Our team solutions consist of a Blog, a Website, a Board Game, and a Video Book Recommendation System.

To kick start our project, we had to start with empathy. All teams had to research to find more background information about the interests of the students. Each team interviewed the Grade 7 students using our own ways of communicating. For example, sending out google forms as surveys to know more about the students. We also had to interview the teacher and watch videos to observe the Grade 7 students reading. Each team had to create a proposal with our possible solutions. Ms. Durrant gave all of us feedback on what we should improve and what she liked about our ideas. It was really fun to get a chance to work with a client and to have a meeting to receive feedback.

A prototype is used to test whether our solution is feasible and works well for our clients. In this case, our clients are the grade 7 students. One team made a website that students can use to interact with to learn what books they should read. The website also allows students to see the feedback from other students. A second team a blog to encourage students to read by using book recommendations. A third team has created short viral style videos that show book recommendations from high school students. Finally, we have a group that created a board game to make reading more fun. Each team has hand-crafted their prototype to allow the Grade 7 students to test it.

After each team presented their prototypes with the Grade 7’s, they receive immediate feedback on what to improve. Right now, each team is hard at work with improving and fixing their prototype model. The next step is for each design team to receive some feedback. How can the prototype be improved. What is working or what parts are not working. It is crucial to receive feedback from clients as this information will tell the designer what to improve on for the next prototype. We plan to go through another round of testing and improving our prototypes before we have our final solution and final design for the Get Reading Project.

In class testing of prototype 1.0