The Challenge
At the Harvard Graduate School Education my team was chose the challenge presented by Google that stated, “How can we leverage the ubiquity of student-owned mobile devices in K12 education?”
The Approach
Through a brainstorming session as a team we decided on developing a mobile application that assisted parents in finding activities to perform with their child in informal settings (i.e.park, restaurants, etc.). We went with this approach as wanted our app to be used globally and informal settings provided an opportunity to assist any parent.
The Discovery
Due to short amount of time we looked up research and asked parents around the building about their experiences with their children. We also performed market research in order to determine if other companies were fulfilling this gap in knowledge through games.
The Vision
The goal of our mobile app was to develop a platform for parents and educators to come together to share educational activities that can be performed in an informal learning setting. For example, if a mother would like to reinforce basic math concepts with her son at the park, she would now have an app that would share with her fun activities to perform at the park that assists her in educating her son in basic math concepts. Users would be able to share activities and additional activities would be created by curriculum developers. All activities that are posted would be pre-approved by moderators to ensure their level of appropriateness and to ensure activities that improve in learning are being posted.
The Framework
Another teammate and I developed the prototype of the product while our other teammates developed the curriculum, interviewed parents, and developed the pitch presentation
The Design
Ed2Go is a mobile application that helps parents convert real life situations into education opportunities through certified material share by others.
The Refinement
Unfortunately due to the short time we were not able to reschedule another meeting with our target users, but if we were afforded more time, our product would go through the iteration phase to understand if our users would be able to use the mobile app seamlessly in mobile situations, if children enjoyed the activities or if the app distracted parents from enjoying time with their children.
The Result
At the end of the course we developed a pitch and prototype of the app using illustrator and inVision.
Event Press Release:
10.20.2014 Harvard Graduate School of Education LaunchPad Website
10.23.2014 Watch Harvard students hack for education