This week, I was tasked with a group assignment to design a tangible learning aid to help a learner explore the concepts below:

We started by brainstorming ideas and asked questions: What are the elements of a story? What would the learners learn from our toolkit? How should we make it engaging? What are the focused age range?

After brainstorming, we were all agree that we should play with the “who”, “what”, “where”, and “when” elements. We decided to focus on younger kids and sketched an early design of Story Board. The idea is to let the players create their own story using blocks and shapes to identify different elements of a story.

Then, we decided to create a low-fidelity prototype using cardboard for playtesting.

Our first design prototype worked well. There’s only one user-experience problem that we found from the playtest. Because the holes (slots) on the block are in the same sizes as the little shapes, it was difficult to take them off after filling them into the block. So, we redesigned it with a small space under each slot.

The last step is to teach them how to play. Since we wanted to make it easy and appealing for the kids to understand, I created a graphic for the introduction and instruction of Story Board.

I love the design process! It was fun to discuss, throw ideas, and be creative. I think playtesting on a low-fidelity prototype helps us a lot to understand how the manipulative could work and what problems that the learners might have while playing with Story Board. It was a great experience to collaborate with my teammates, Shuang and Kristina. We discussed a lot of ideas and tried to find a solution together. Lastly, I really like our final design and can’t wait to see other people play with it!