Reflecting Back on our First Cycle

Looking Back

It’s not a secret that our team loves reflection; there’s a reason we focused on student reflection in our first cycle. And given our first prototype, it’s only fitting that we reflect on our own experience as we move into cycle 2.

Although we love our app idea, we feel that we should have better iterated on and developed our idea throughout the cycle. It would have been great to take the idea back to teachers to ask for feedback, or even done an evaluation for ourselves in the middle of the cycle. Instead, we waited until we had some technical results to demonstrate, at which point there was too little time left in the cycle to do more design work.

On the more technical side of our prototype this past cycle, we worked well on bits and pieces of our node app, but never accomplished total integration. We ran into many problems with developing in node because we lacked experience with the tools we were trying to use. Rather than working towards our strengths or genuinely understanding what we needed to do before we approached implementation, we got stuck in the process of using brute force to implement aspects of our prototype.

Moving Ahead

Going forward, the principle goal of our team is to create impact. We would like to use tools that we are more comfortable with as learning a whole new skill in less than three weeks seems unlikely to pan out. Our team is more software centric, so it is likely that whatever route we take will be in the software realm. All of us have taken a software design course in the past, and so have a plethora of experience with python.

One side of this experience we have not yet explored involves designing for people other than teachers. Teachers are perhaps the easiest to design for as they are reasonably easy to access and have a direct interest in student development. However, there are also students, parents, administrators not to mention the rest of society that have some stake in our current education system. Students are difficult to design for as codesign is nearly impossible given a lack of access. Administrators are usually very busy and are hesitant to endorse anything which might not show a direct impact. Parents too, are very difficult to access and are usually very busy. However, it would be great to incorporate the ideas of at least some other stakeholders into our next cycle.

We’re excited for this next cycle and hope all our loyal fans are too!