Straying Away From the Path and Towards Solutions

At this point, we were moving towards solutions. This is mostly all that we did between 4/26 and 5/1. We had a bunch of more brainstorms that identified ideas of interventions to get more kids interested in STEM.

If this sounds like the same as what we did on 4/25 except drawn out over a week, you would be right. If this sounds like a little bit of a leap from where we were at 4/25, you would also be right. We were still new to the design school process, and during this week, we strayed from the path. At each meeting, we would 'brainstorm' a few solutions that were really just some of the insights we gained from our interviews rephrased as solutions or as 'how might we' statements. That is, we would turn "parental support in STEM topics gets kids interested in STEM" into "how might we increase parental support in STEM topics?" Also, since we were thinking about solutions rather than thinking directly about our interviews, we were free to ignore our users and go into our gut reactions on how to increase STEM education (ie, educating parents on why STEM is important). I will avoid rehashing all of the repeated stuff and the unhelpful two by twos.

Not all was bad, though. We did manage to narrow down our focus a bit. We decided that we were interested in hands on hobbies and activities and that we were interested in parents, particularly parents with non-technical backgrounds (since we saw in our synthesis phase that the needs of children of parents with technical backgrounds were much more met than the children of parents with non-technical backgrounds). We were also interested in using entertainment and the media.

One thing that we discussed that I think we really could have gone forward with was getting kids excited. This was the insight from before about some people identifying as "math kids" and others not. We wanted to democratize that identity. We wanted to get interest in non-formal education since attachment to a subject in school (which has the extrinsic motivation of grades) is secondary to interest in that subject in general (which has intrinsic motivation).

In case you care to look at our rehashings, our whiteboards: