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NEIA HCD education

A human centered design approach to teaching design, engineering, and entrepreneurship to grade school students.

Project Details

I worked as part of a team at the New England Innovation Academy (NEIA) to craft and teach the Innovation Studio Program. The Innovation Studio is a multi-disciplinary design studio that teaches responsible innovation, engineering, and entrepreneurship. The curriculum guided students through the process of doing exploratory research, conducting user interviews, prototyping, prototype testing, and iteration. The final project for the year was a product design development project in which students would work in teams to develop a product before selling it to members of the public at the schools annual sales Gala.

tools

Notion
Miro

role

UX Research
Design Education
Teaching

Timeline

1 - 2 Years

Team

Nicholas Tamas
Francisco Mireles
John Turner

problem

  • The curriculum has to be accessible to students across a diverse age range and education levels anywhere between 6th and 12th grade.
  • The subjects of design, engineering, and entrepreneurship are not common subjects at other schools; so many students will be starting with little or no prior knowledge in these subjects.
  • Incoming and Current students have a variety of learning accommodations and prior education that needs to be accounted for.
  • The curriculum has to adhere to the school's competency based learning system.
  • Curriculum needs to incorporate a variety of hands on making and critical problem solving skills.
  • The curriculum has to be structured in a way that makes it easy for collaboration with other subjects being taught at the school like math, science, humanities, ect.

Me instructing a student on the proper use of an x-acto knife.

Goals

  • Independent curriculums based on grade levels that don't require prior knowledge on the student's behalf.
  • Each project has multiple points in which students can be assessed.
  • Each project incorporates ongoing knowledge they gain in other subjects and gives them the skills necessary to participate in the end of the year sales gala.
  • Complexity of the course work and depth of knowledge touched on increases with each grade level.

a multi-disciplinary design studio that teaches responsible innovation and entrepreneurship

impact

  • The success of the Innovation Studio program can be seen in the high retention rate of students. As well as an increase in school applicants for subsequent years.
  • In fall 2023 The Innovation Studio along with the school passed NEASC accreditation.

applicant increase 31%

student  retention yield increase 12%

First graduating class of seniors following the second iteration of the Innovation Studio curriculum during the spring of 2024.

development

Innovation Studio  Foundation

One of the NEIA's founders and visionary behind the Innovation Studio at NEIA, was Matthew Kressy. A designer, educator, and founder of MIT’s Integrated Design Management program (IDM).Much of the Innovation Studio was based on teaching similar principles to those taught in the IDM program. The challenge was taking those projects and concepts that are being taught on a collegiate level and making them understandable and accessible to grade school level students.

Students in MIT’s IDM program.

HCD Process

An example of the human centered design process taught across the curriculum to NEIA students. The Human Centered Design cycle outlines how students would go through multiple rounds of ideation, prototyping, and testing with their users before implementing a design.

dFV Framework

The DFV framework is a way for students to self assess their own designs based on their desirability (whether or not their users want their designs), feasibility (their ability to execute or create their design), and viability (their ability to fund or implement their design without financial loss). This framework not only aided in students identifying whether or not their designs were successful, but also in down-selecting ideas and concepts from their initial ideation phase in the project.

Curriculum annual themes

Each grade of students was tasked with going through a product design development cycle at the end of the year to create a good or service to be sold at the NEIA’s end of the year Sales Gala. Each grade was tasked with designing around a particular theme. The theme defined what type of projects they would complete throughout the year leading up to the Gala.

fashion

lighting

farming

kitchen

sports & outdoors

passion projects

real world projects

student prototyping

Students would learn a variety of skills in the Innovation Studio depending on the theme of their given year. Some of the skills include digital and physical prototyping, CAD, coding, wood working, and much more.

Students giving an express presentation on their designs.

Students cardboard prototyping a design.

Students creating a library redesign for VR in CAD.

Student working in the school’s woodshop.

Students prototyping an electronic piano design using cardboard and PCB’s.

Students working on a kitchen utensil design for the Gala.

Student opportunity identification and research

Students were taken on exploratory field trips that were made for students to perform opportunity identification, analyze market trends, do competitive analyses, and identify potential users for their designs that they would make for the Gala.

A student doing farmwork in order to identify pain points in farming manual labor.

A group of students touring a kitchen specialty store in order to perform a competitive analysis.

testing

User interviews

Following each project, students were interviewed and asked to write reflections on the project as a whole. This coupled with interviews of teachers and students' parents formed the basis for revising and iterating on the program.

John Turner and Devin Worthington interviewing a parent.

final designs

NEIA Sales Gala

At the end of their year, students participate in NEIA’s sales Gala where they sell the products they designed with their teammates in the last Innovation Studio project of the year. In addition to the design research and prototyping, students are made to account for their material and equipment cost. This coupled with having to competitively price their designs in order to sell them is the main determining factor in whether or not students make a profit. Students retain all profits and the intellectual property of their designs developed in the Gala, and some have gone on to turn these designs into successful businesses continued after the Gala’s conclusion.

Overview of NEIA’s Sales Gala.

Students setting up their booth for their lighting design.

Students discussing their lighting design for a modular light.

The design of the invitation distributed to the public for the Sales Gala.

Students standing in front of their booth for their product “Pop Soap.”

reflection

I was fortunate enough to have two great partners in my fellow designers John Turner and Francisco Mireles to help plan and implement this curriculum with. The fact that there was no standardized basis for teaching human centered design to the age group the school was teaching also afforded me a great amount of flexibility. If I felt a project was going too long or was not getting the results I intended, I could quickly iterate on it and change it for the better. One of the main issues that has persisted is how the curriculum has to be accessible to students starting at any grade level. This means that the curriculum was limited in both years with what it could teach as it could not rely on students compounding on design principles and techniques that they may have previously learned. It also created an inconvenience for returning students as they would have to repeat some fundamentals each year in order to accommodate incoming students. One possible solution to this would be to implement a foundations course specifically for incoming students. Most NEIA students enter in at the beginning of middle school (6th grade) or high school (9th grade). This means most of these incoming students could be funneled into a foundations course their first semester at NEIA with little or no impact on the rest of the student body. This coupled with more specialized design courses that mirror the theming already established would allow for the teaching of more advanced design subjects.

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