Teaching, as designing an experience for kids
Experiences are memorable, and I aim to design one!
Designing experiences for kids is crucial as designers don’t know what kids want, like, expect or think. Kids differ from adults in their cognitive and emotional intelligence. Their partially developed emotional control system makes them less predictable to acceptable responses and reactions. Also, kids interact constantly with the surroundings as they are at a stage of developing gross and fine motor skills. However, researchers have identified patterns through usability tests which shows trust, repetition and consistency is the key to understand child cognition.
During my learning to create the best possible experiences for middle school kids, I have tried out methods like exposing them to micro-conflict situations where they are forced to reflect on their thoughts while doing mundane jobs such as handwriting to throwing them into this unique phenomenon called Development Zone where they are competing with an adult. I have learnt that the experience needs to be designed in a way that initially establishes credibility and shows consistency in nature. Kids learn quickly and enjoy challenging experiences, however their attention span is limited and longer experiences have shorter outcomes. A series of short and repeating enjoyable actions is ideal for designing an experience for kids where we can set a goal at the beginning and achieve the same through harmonised actions. Use of interactive storytelling and experimentation also helps to keep them invested during longer experiences.
The key to attain predictability in child behaviour is the iterative process of communicating clear goals, breaking and modelling the goal out into simpler synchronising coordinating and connecting actions, engaging them with work that involves them to retain the process and giving constant positive feedback as they make progress along the way.
Once the predictability has been established and we know what kids already do when exposed to a certain situation, we can channelise the same into what they can achieve by recreating the same experience with tiny modifications to push kids towards higher order thinking skills. This has again it’s pros and cons. If successful, the process establishes credibility of kids towards themselves and they keep learning while they easily give up if they fail. Thus, the experience should also have lateral methods in achieving the same objective.
Certain irrational results can still occur due to factors like high unpredictability of primer reflexes in certain kids, the vastness of age range, different learning speeds and interest levels. That needs redesigning the same experience with varied levels of rigour, time and engagement which we figure out with time and data along the way.
To conclude, kids minds are a pattern making system and this pattern is unique to each kid which needs differentiated facilitation. As a middle school teacher and an aspiring designer, I aim to design self-learning experiences for kids, differentiated on the basis of learning capabilities of each child and improve them through constant feedback collection. In my following post, I shall discuss about how teachers can push lateral thinking skills in kids by letting them creatively resolve disagreements.
