Activity Canvas
How might we make the historic objects and art at the Diplomatic Reception Rooms accessible to educators and inspire students to engage with civic life through this collection?
I led the design to create an engaging, user-friendly, and highly interactive platform to support K-12 arts and humanities education in the United States.
Role
Lead designer— discovery, user research, prototyping, design, testing
Client
U.S. Department of State - Capstone project with UMD
Toolbox
Figma, Principle, Mural, Zoom
context
The Diplomatic Reception Rooms at the U.S. Department of State is full of 18th-century American art and furnishings from the earliest days of the United States. In these Rooms, the United States signs treaties, conduct summit negotiations, hosts swearing-in ceremonies, facilitates trade agreements and promotes peace.
This collection is not widely available to view or use by teachers, students, and the public. Our goal is to make this collection accessible to the teachers and students and communicate the important role the Diplomatic Reception Rooms play in facilitating diplomacy.
Source: PBS, “Field Trip: Diplomatic Reception Rooms”. Aired: 12/17/12
the solution
Activity Canvas is an engaging, user-friendly interactive platform to support K-12 arts and humanities education in the United States. This is a platform for teachers to access thousands of historical resources from the Diplomatic Reception Rooms, and create and share classroom activities with their students and colleagues.
The activities and materials developed with Activity Canvas can supplement the curriculum. They create an approach to learning that allows students to construct meaning from their interactions with objects through a system of making observations, developing inferences, and generating their own questions that result in further investigation.
Activity hub to browse, share and create classroom activities using thousands of historical resources from the Diplomatic Reception Rooms
Activity Editors for teachers to create and customize an activity by adding text, objects, assessment metrics, and set a timer for their students to complete the activity
Gamified experiences for the students to learn about the history and the objects with immersive audio/visual experiences
Understanding the
problem space
research process
01. Contextual inquiry with 22 teachers from different grade levels and subjects
02. Phone interviews with 4 Educators to understand how they teach diplomacy
03. Co-design with students aged 7-11 to understand how they respond to diplomacy
04. Affinity analysis and Experience modelling to synthesize the research findings
Observing how students learn from artefacts
Co-design activities with kids
Affinity analysis with 1500+ rich qualitative data points
Findings
key insights
01. Activities supplement lesson plans
Many object-oriented learning methodologies such as SEE THINK WONDER are used by teachers to encourage students to wonder, connect dots, and develop intuition.
02. Historical artefacts increase student engagement
Accessible artefacts from government organizations like the Department of State is important for educators. They see increased student engagement when using objects to teach.
03. Activities should be inclusive
Inclusivity and representation are important in creating teaching activities to enable all the students to have a chance to excel, regardless of learning styles.
04. Activities are created around an anchor point
Teachers keep in mind a lesson, concept, or theme that they can cycle back to at the end of the activity and teach through association.
05. Students of all ages learn through activities
Getting students interested in civic engagement at a younger age has been anecdotally noticed as a pathway to continuing interest as they grow older.
Insights and analysis of the educators' persona
Using design thinking methods to find solutions
Formative design activities
01. User Environment Design to establish the basic product structure and functions
02. User Flows to map out the interactions across the platform
03. Storyboards to shape the user journey, personas, and various research findings
04. Prototypes at low, mid, and high fidelity to test and iterate
User Environment Diagram
Storyboarding, work in progress
Mapping out user flows to create an information hierarchy
Validation and iteration through prototypes
evaluative activities
01. Low-Fidelity Prototype evaluation with 4 Educators to receive conceptual feedback
02. Wireframe evaluation with 4 Educators to iterate on the structure
03. High-Fidelity testing with 8 Educators to evaluate interaction and visual design
Low-fi paper prototypes for quick iteration
Mid-fidelity wireframes and mockups to establish structure
Presenting wireframes at one of the client meetings
The Result
final solution screens
Activity Canvas manifested as the hub to browse, create and share object-based classroom activities. Click on any image to enlarge and browse through the final solution.
Next steps
if we had more time, we'd focus on..
01. Solutions to bridge the gap between different state standards and curriculum
02. Switch between Lexile levels, especially with object descriptions
03. Increase customizability/collaboration for teachers in Activity Canvas
04. Provide activity templates for teachers to create activities quickly
05. Allow teachers to upload their own activities and let them customize
The team was awarded 'Most innovative project' at the annual iSchool symposium 2019