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Map Your Mind

A mind mapping toolkit for students to track and reflect on their learning.
Duration: Sep.–Dec. 2021 (course project)
Role: Key Researcher and Designer
Team: Aastha Patel, Anjali Kanodia, Kate Zhao
Instructed by: Marti Louw, Jessica Franko (TA)
Highlight of this project:
Define the ambiguous prompt ‘cross-curriculum’ and narrow down the scope of the design through research.
Our team explored the possibilities and constraints of cross-curricular learning in a local unconventional high school through several rounds of research, and eventually narrowed down our focus to one area for prime design outcomes.
 
You’ll see not only the joy of us clearing away the mist around the ambiguous prompt in the early stage, but also the struggles we went through when deciding which idea to land on.
 
Final solution: a physical toolkit + a digital platform organizing mind maps.
My contribution: I actively participated in every step, with major contribution in contextual inquiries, sketching the three-step model, designing and analyzing the probes, physical and digital prototypes, and showcase animations.

Intro: Project Context

This project was completed in collaboration with City of Bridges High School (CoBHS), a competency-based learning community located in Pittsburgh. As a member of the Mastery Transcript Consortium, a growing organization promoting evaluating students’ learning outcomes based on competencies rather than exam scores, CoBHS emphasizes the transferable understanding of knowledge, student agency, and active engagement in communities.

Traditional learning divides knowledge into subjects (e.g. Math, Chemistry…). But in real world contexts, skills (or ‘competencies’, e.g. collaboration, communication) are more fundamental when completing tasks. ‘Competency-based learning’ was introduced to address this gap between school education and real-world application, and it’s gaining momentum in recent years.

My project group was assigned to a specific topic to work on—‘cross-curriculum’. It was a challenge to define this ambiguous prompt—specifically, how ‘cross-curriculum’ is currently implemented and what problems/areas of improvement exist. 

Part 1: Empathize & Define

What are the challenges for CoB’s teachers and students?

Stakeholder interviews: understand competency-based learning environment as a whole

stakeholder map
Emerging issues: assess and design cross curricula, students' individual differences, students' motivation, make competency-based learning scalable...
We then conducted a kick-off meeting with the Food Systems teacher, Jess, as a team.
  • ‘Food systems should be in every curriculum because food is identity and culture…my background in food systems explores it through a very interdisciplinary lens.‘
  • ‘The value in cross-curricular education is really the systems-level view…the systems thinking approach of the way stuff works…giving students a more honest view of how the universe works.’
  • ‘It’s tough being an administrator and a teacher at the same time…it is very overwhelming.‘

Contextual inquiry: discover problems in the school context

So far we had only interacted with stakeholders virtually and pieced together the school environment through information on their website. Now is the time to better understand the school as a whole – the physical context, the operation of a regular school day, and the teaching and learning process.

First visit
What we did: observed a complete Food Systems class; talked with Jess and another science teacher during the break.
As we were organizing our observation and interpretation of how CoB functions using a mind map, we discovered a prominent tension between the presence and absence of structure at the school.
There is a lot of structure in the behind-the-scenes planning process, but not in the actual classroom. How can we help organize the chaos?

A ‘Physical space model’ derived from the visit

Note: The physical constraints of the school were something we strongly felt during the visits. The school was currently located in a family house–it’s much smaller than a regular school and has a very different cozy style accordingly. But coziness means less space for teaching aids and fun activities, which were explicitly expressed by teachers.
Second visit

We wanted to go beyond the surface and explore further into cross-curricular design–specifically, how teachers design the courses, challenges, collaboration, and their motivation.

Besides, Jess has not received professional training to be a teacher despite the fact that she knew much about food systems. Therefore, we couldn’t conclude whether the ‘non-structured’ status quo only happens in the Food Systems class or poses a challenge for all cross-curricula.

This time, we conducted three additional interviews with other teachers and talked with some students, and learned that teachers’ collaboration, course planning, and a lack of structure in the classroom were challenges faced by all the teachers. Consequently, students question whether they are learning anything from cross disciplines.
Quotes from stakeholders
organize interview notes using affinity diagram

Synthesize discovery phase with a 'three-step teaching model'

Note: We drew inspiration from Holtzblatt’s “Day-in-the-life” experience model, but instead of looking at it at the scale of ‘day’, we zoomed out to the cyclical teaching and learning experience of a cross-curricular course.
Emerging issues from the discovery phase

Design probes: narrow down the focus & approach inner thoughts

Backward thinking: What data is most desired?
  • We wanted to learn about the perspectives of students as supplements for our existing data.
  • We wanted to dig beneath the surface, learning what teachers didn’t express or reveal during interviews, especially related to emotional energy.
  • Relevant to emerging issues we previously defined.
Organizing our thoughts on the boards

With careful consideration, we realized that the overarching theme of ‘structured vs. non-structured’ within the school system was a fascinating one and worth digging deeper into.

Based on this direction, we designed two probes.

Probe #1: Wishlist Box

Participants: Students and teachers
Purpose: Understand what their ideal learning/teaching experience looks like.
Method: Write down their wishes on a piece of paper, fold it and put it in the box (collected anonymously)
Prompt examples: “I wish for my school…”, “I wish my teacher…”, “I wish for my classroom…”, “I want to give ___(name of the teacher) this superpower: ___”,“I can learn better if I had this superpower: ___”

Probe #2: Photographs

Participants: Teachers
Purpose: Visualize the challenging moments of teachers and how they manage to overcome them.
Method: Take pictures that they feel are related to the concepts / opposing binaries given (mark the approximate level of the extremity).

Binary dimensions: Order–Chaos, Rules–No Rules, Freedom–Constraints
Concepts: Overwhelmed, Uncertainty, Reflection

Data collection & analysis

We collected the paper chits and photographs a week after we sent out the probes.

probes data analysis: finding similarity among artifacts

The key findings are almost consistent with our previous data, but issues such as ‘collaboration’, ‘reflection’, and ‘physical space’ are more prominent.

Design opportunities

Our research process has revealed the following four design opportunities:
  • How might we help foster collaboration among teachers?
  • How might we help students keep track of their learning progress?
  • How might we intrinsically motivate students to want to learn more?
  • How might we leverage technology to ‘enlarge’ the physical space?

Part 2: Ideate

Storyboards brainstorming

Each of us created four storyboards individually, and then together we picked five ideas we found most promising.
vote and comment
selected five storyboards

Land on four ideas after brainstorming

Speed dating: efficiently testing users' needs & preferences

This is a quick and efficient way to validate whether the stories we envisioned actually met the needs of both teachers and students. This helped us narrow down our focus and move forward with the idea(s) that were most desirable and promising.

We brought the five storyboards to CoBHS, introduced our ideas to teachers and students, and listened to their thoughts and preferences.

notes from the speed dating session
Key findings:
  • Both students and educators prefer physical tools over digital tools.
  • Students do feel the need to reflect on their learning and keep track of their progress.
  • Some sort of extrinsic rewards are still desired by students.
  • Teachers found the collaboration card game interesting and potentially helpful, but there remain subtle concerns over professional intervention.

After careful consideration of stakeholders’ opinions, we decided to keep two ideas: the reflection tool for students and the card game for teachers.

Land on two ideas after speed dating

Struggles at this point: Which idea should we pick?

We envisioned a white board, either physical or digital, that enables students to document their key takeaways from the cross curricular and make connections between scattered knowledge components.
sketching out the reflection idea
We envisioned a card game in which teachers use prompts from different categories to seek out the intersections of their expertise, which in turn informs their curricula planning as well as in-class implementation. But we were cautious of bringing too much structure into the current school context–we’re not experts in planning cross-curricula either. So what we planned to do through these two ideas was only to provide scaffoldings for reflection/collaboration as well as making this process joyful.
We’ve been struggling with settling on one idea for quite some time because we see values in both ideas. We also attempted to combine these ideas into one integrated solution but found it too ambitious considering our expertise and the remaining time for the project. Eventually, we picked the idea of reflection tools for the following reasons:
  • Students have expressed a clear interest in this idea during the speed dating session;
  • Due to the interactive nature of the reflection tools, the story we can tell with this idea seems fun to enact and therefore more likely to grab listeners’ attention.
  • We do have some concerns over bringing pressure to the teachers’ curriculum planning and it requires much professional expertise to design feasible categories for the prompts on the cards.

Final design direction

Flesh out the idea

More details were discussed as we fleshed out the reflection idea:

Reflection is mostly helpful over the long term–>focus on one ‘block’ which is repeatable over the whole semester while also allowing some progress to be made on reflection (a block represents six weeks and each course lasts for a block).

This is the most time-consuming issue throughout our discussions. The concept of ‘scaffolding’ is critical to our design because we are mindful of impeding students’ independent thinking by providing too detailed suggestions.

At first, we were inspired by the idea of ‘six thinking hats’ created by Edward de Bono, and used each color to represent one type of question to help students reflect, for example, red (emotions) is related to ‘How do you feel about this class?’, black (questions) is related to ‘What questions remain?’, green (creativity) is related to ‘other thoughts on mind’, etc. This set of questions can cover almost all the essential questions of reflection, but we also recognized its practical limitations when it comes to mapping them out on the whiteboard.

So we started to simplify the categories by rethinking what’s most important for their reflection or why they even need to reflect. That’s when we decided to make our product land on competencies—the ultimate goal of reflection should be helping students not only see the knowledge connections but also how they are related to the competencies.

We finalized the categories of the prompts using the insights gained from CoB’s current method (informed by Jess) to help teachers decompose competencies into students’ evidence of understanding, which contained three aspects: ‘know’, ‘understand’, and ‘do’. But when students are actually writing notes on the cards, it is unnecessary to differentiate between these three categories in such a granular way. We also simulated our reflection process for the class we take, recalling what comes to mind when asking ourselves what we’ve learned. We realized that the concept, or the big topic, is the first impression, and then comes the details relating to this concept. So we landed on these finalized categories: themes, takeaways, and remaining questions.

The reflection processes of different students vary a lot, and so do the mind maps they create. Therefore, there is value in building students’ individual mind maps that apply to their own knowledge structure. The teacher can also guide the process of doing mind mapping for the entire class, but each student will interact with their own toolkit to enhance learning.

Students and teachers both prefer physical tools over digital ones because of the potential learning curve of the technologies. But it’s also necessary to store the data as a digital version so that students are able to permanently review their previous mind maps and keep building up their knowledge structure as learning proceeds. So we decided to adopt a hybrid solution: starting as a physical handy toolkit that students can carry around, and translating it into digital in the later stage.

sketching out more details

Learning experience map

The Learning Experience Map illustrates the details of our solution. Basically, we are designing a service instead of simple use of tools (i.e. whiteboard and magnetic chits). You’ll also see the enactment in the following video.

Part 3: Prototype & Feedback

Physical prototypes

1. Each student will get a reflection bag, colored magnetic chits, a foldable whiteboard, markers, and stickers.
2. Students will write down their goals for this block based on the competencies, and put this paper inside the pocket of the reflection bag as a reminder.
3. The three colorful chits represent ‘themes’, ‘takeaways’, ‘remaining questions’ as reflection prompts.
4. Students make connections between the reflection cards, and use the created mind map to discuss with the teacher.
5. Students keep building on their mind map as the block proceeds.

Physical-->Digital Transition

Students use an App on the phone to scan their physical mind map, which intelligently generates a digital version of the map with ‘themes’ and ‘takeaways’ as nodes. The data on the App will be in sync with the desktop version, using which students are able to perform more detailed functions such as tagging competencies and zooming out to view the entire knowledge structure.

(we made use of an existing mobile app: https://www.doumind-app.com/)

Digital prototypes

The digital version of the map will be loaded in pre-created folder for the particular block and the teacher lists all competencies of the block and as the learners finalize the map. On each node of the mind map, students can write comments, tag competencies, and tag subjects.

Students can choose to view the mind maps of all their courses and keep building connections among knowledge nodes. They can connect across different blocks and add new notes and comments to synthesize their learning

After tagging competencies to certain nodes, students can use the filter feature to select a particular cometency and then review the mind map with chosen competencies highlighted.

Feedback from stakeholders

Due to time constraints, we didn’t get the chance to test out the prototypes. More importantly, it’s hard to evaluate the effectiveness of the design in a short time because it involves a long and collaborative process. But we conducted a virtual poster session at the end of the semester and received valuable feedback from teachers and students from CoB.

Affirmation

  • The enactment video is really vivid and helps contextualize the idea.
  • They really love that there is a lot of student ownership over their own education.
  • A good starting point to introduce students to ‘competencies’.
  • ‘I love the hands-on collaboration between students and teachers.’

Concerns

  • Limitation of physical white board: how to map our several courses at the same time?
  • Students have different learning styles that might not fit our idea.
  • Students may need additional support from teachers in understanding competencies, setting learning goals, and using technologies.
  • When is the best time to introduce the digital mind map?

Part 4: Reflection

I’m really proud of what my team has achieved in just three months. We conducted really solid research which convincingly backed up all of our design decisions. All of us were passionate about doing something good for this small yet warm high school and so we went above and beyond the requirements in lots of aspects. Besides, the support we got from the CoB was extremely critical for our success—our continuous communication with Jess, the internal documents provided by the teachers, the kindness of all the students… The genuine passion for education rooted in these teachers’ hearts constantly motivated me throughout the project. It was an unforgettable experience working with all of them, and the synergy we had was marvelous.

1. Discover the multiple challenges of ‘cross curriculum’ system and narrow down our design focus.
2. Competency-based learning is innovative for the school as well; a lot of considerations come up as we try to bring structures into the current system. We are also faced with the balance between ‘structured’ and ‘non-structured’.
3. We tried our best to avoid involving complex technologies, but physical products alone are indeed not enough to achieve our visions. This is a major force that keeps dragging us back and pushing us to think outside the box.
4. It was extremely hard to design the scaffolding of the reflection while not impeding students’ independent thinking.

1. Not all students are suitable for such a structured way of learning and reflection.
2. Not all teachers are accustomed to using mindmapping as the guiding format. Currently, only Jess has explicitly expressed her affirmation over mindmapping.
3. Students need a lot of help with the early stages of the service we envisioned.

1. Our final idea itself has a lot of space for further research and testing.
2. We need more fundamental justification for the benefits of ‘mindmapping’, or broadly speaking, the importance of making associations.
3. Slowly transferring to a purely digital mind map is perhaps the most desired solution.
4. The card game for teachers.

Affirmation from Jess:
“Their dedication was just unparalled. They created the vision that I preferred, and gosh, did they do a great job! I LOVED their work, and this concept. The team worked through the challenge of having just one classroom mindmap to developing meaningful cross-curricular connections…I was really impressed they were able to find a way to tie them together using DoUMind! That was pretty revolutionary to me, and something I’ll take to the class immediately.”

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