After missing what could have turned into a super productive making day because of the snow day, we headed to LCCS for our week 6 session with the students fully prepared with lots of ideation exercises.

The LCCS and Parsons students got paired/mixed with each other to complete a series of mini ideation exercises involving drawings, discussions and narrative development. One thing I realised that really stayed with me from this session is how mature the LCCS kids actually are! Although we all knew this from the beginning that they are grade 6, 7, 8 students, I feel like I have been treating them to much like little kids, in effect missing out on an opportunity to have more serious conversations with them about the environment.

Nevertheless, our idea sharing/synthesizing/vote session went quite well in my opinion. All of the students I spoke to were excited about their ideas when explaining their stories/characters to me and they all really listened when I told them about my character. As we all spoke to at least 4-5 other students, we ended up with lots of ideas: the originals and the combined hybrids. This meant many of the new (and old) ideas had to be discarded or somehow synthesized into the new/selected ones. One girl on my team came up with a beautiful story about a seal-princess and suggested we incorporate shadow puppet effect in the project that she knows how to do, in effect creating a performance. This was the last idea I worked on during the ideation session so we put the idea down as our proposal for others to vote on. It didn’t receive many votes, mostly because I think there were other projects already going viral amongst the older boys and kids catch onto these things very quickly ahihi.

Below: My character turtle boy who goes on a quest to collect all the resources needed to build a device that can tell the difference between jellyfish and plastic bag.

Just before we started the ideation session:

 

I joined the Trash Trivia team which I thought was a team with the most straightforward idea. The challenge for us going forward would be to rebrand the trivia/jeopardy/family feud styles that were proposed to fit the earth day theme while at the same time keeping the questions both fun and informative/educational. Finding this balance I think would be the hardest especially since trivias and game show styles are already very popular among the general population and introducing completely new elements may throw things off too much. At the same time, the popularity of these shows also make the Trash Trivia idea already very attractive to the public, as can be easily seen from the way the idea went viral in seconds during our ideation session.

I’m looking forward to developing Trash Trivia further!

And once again we showed up at LCCS. 3 PM sharp, made our way via PATH train all the way to Jersey and then back. In between those two points in time, the time we were at LCCS were highly productive. The structure was relatively straightforward, as we were grouped Parsons/LCCS students to create new/old storyboards on post-it notes to showcase our ideas for, well, stories. It somehow went on a rotational basis and our objective was to merge the stories. As best I tried to do so, I wrote down key points of the stories showcased the students (as at times I was grouped up with a few) and then ultimately it all broke down to a story that one LCCS student came up with that went as a standalone and viral, growing up into Trash Trivia, leading up to which a heated debate sprawled out with not much action taken on my part. This time I was being more proactive but ultimately it came down to being a design facilitator and writing down those ideas. Despite my supporting activity here, other students kind of drove their own, ideas, logos, new students joined up. And ultimately the idea, as sharp as it became with about 6 students involved in this project (rising up from 2 at first I believe), was quite captivating to observe, especially once it was driven to winning the contest by the end of our stay at LCCS.

From the details I have gathered, Trash Trivia is an idea which merges elements from Jeopardy and Family Feud, where the center-point established is the theme of ecology, recycling and being conscious within such subjects, leading towards increased awareness. From what I could gather and figured in my head, well the main ingredients required here would be, well:

• Arduino circuit boards or equivalents
  • Big buttons (I love this example: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/p/big-red-switch/8vbrh7b3xl47, just because of how ridiculously expensive it is)
• Large-scale artworks and built environment (what? I don’t have a background in interior design)

Which is kinda nice, as in a way this is a concept entirely doable, from what I see also highly engaging but it needs to keep a certain grit to it, perhaps host prizes, otherwise interest could be lost quite rapidly (surrounding marketing?).

I’ll upload the notes from the stories I transcribed of other students. It’s a bit of a mess as there is a lot but I liked a lot of these stories, as they were quite imaginative, although as these started mixing up with other stories, it was beginning to be more difficult to synthesise all the variety of ideas into just one.

By the end of the week I received a phone call as I was notified, there was a meeting scheduled that I did not attend. I have kind of given up on reading emails, just glancing very briefly at every one and each incoming from all the swarm hitting my gmail shores, especially once I signed up to MFADT newsletter. That, in addition with the rrrreeal sweet mid-term-a-day schedule, kinda did its thing, that I was a bit unreachable for, well, almost an entire week I’d presume. I’m not entirely sure what is my role at this point, from what I’ve gathered I’ll be supporting from the technological part with Unity in particular. I personally really liked the idea of the hydrodrangeas and I sort of created a VR prototype for Monday’s students’ project proposals. It’s just that I was battling hours with Unity, switching between rendering pipelines, reimporting assets and in fact, adopting a custom movement script I have devised with a friend about 2 years back designed primarily for google cardboard VR. Then, also, certain event systems decided to not work in VR for some reason, so I did come up with a prototype that I was ultimately unhappy with. I’ll revise it and perhaps attach it by the end of the day (or early tomorrow with additional supporting material).

The thing with working with Unity in particular but pretty much with any bit more elaborate software, bouncing back and forth from issues related to those can become a nightmare. Whether it’s programming software, rendering lighting, working with Adobe software. One of the designerly pains that just come with the job etiquette.

We visited LCCS on Mar.11 for pitching our final ideas. During the class, we shared and ideated our hero’s journies and storyboards with each other. Finally, we got many great stories like Greener Grass, Trash Trivia, Polluters and Protectors, and the Ocean Odyssey, we Parsons students also presented our first draft prototypes to LCCS students, all of our projects provided immersive experience to the audience. Qiyao and I want to keep testing and exploring our idea during spring break, our final goal is to create this engaging underwater experience inside of the dome in order to bring up awareness of ocean plastic pollution.

As a teacher, a class like this is formed through years of practice of what works and doesn’t. There are flaws in the process of ideating together in a short amount of time. One thing that happens is that everyone becomes very excited and talkative through the process. The end of the class was a bit messy but we achieved our aims. OK–they are still going to go through quite a bit of:

1. Research for inspiration and accurate information
2. Creative exploration so that we can arrive at playable and fun experiences.
3. Aesthetic development of the look and feel for each project
4. A common thread that will tie the entire arc of the stories together. What does a farmer (Greener Grass) who at first fouls the river with his farm chemicals have to do with a game about Trash Trivia? Or how can we tie the Ocean Odyssey to the Polluters and Protectors?  We have to all think hard on this and come up with entertaining and educational answers.We also have to settle on final venues so that we can organize the kind of production that each experience needs.  In two weeks, we should have answers…