Designing Playful Learning Experiences Using a Human Centric Design Approach

Designers often do not receive first hand experience and feedback of student response to their lessons. Here at Karkhana Samuha we adopt a human centered approach to designing lessons and kits putting students at the center of our design. To ensure that different characteristics of ‘play’ are integrated well into the lessons, Sameer and Akshay, teachers and lesson designers at Karkhana Samuha, have been constantly testing lessons they designed with the students they are designing for. Here, the two designers share insights and experience on play-based classrooms during the first 6 months of teaching with and designing PEBL (Playful Engineering Based Learning) kits.

Interview with Sameer, facilitator and content designer/developer for the PEBL course

1. Which content in general was received with the most excitement and interest? What kind of response did it get? Why do you think that is?

"I can see you now." Students as they adjust the mirrors inside the periscope

"Oh wow...." Students dropping their paper helicopters from height to enjoy watching the fall

Usually learners got most excited when the project was something they could play with at the end- like the periscope and paper helicopter. Also, they were immersed when they encountered novel experiences. For instance, they had seen the foo machine in their books but creating it physically was fascinating. Some learners had not played with electronics before so they were drawn towards that too. But there were also a few challenges in following the instruction sheet as it was in English. Since I worked with public school learners, they struggled to make sense of some English instructions such as verbs like 'flip' which is written in a colloquial term a little bit unfamiliar to learners there. However, the class size was small with only 12 learners so I was able to address their confusion efficiently. Learners would also get confused when the placemat photos of certain materials did not match the actual material in their pouches even though it served the same function.

2. How was PEBL different from the other hands-on classes you have taught?

"It's working fine but we aren't happy with it. We can make it much better." students dismantling their traffic light project to improve the design.

I've taught some hands-on classes before at Karkhana where the sessions were designed to meet certain deliverables. For instance, I taught forty minute classes on some science concepts which were generally fun for students and teachers both. Karkhana classes emphasized iteration but still one of the major indicators of a successful class was finishing a project that was started. PEBL was a lot more flexible in defining learning. I felt differently about the concept of completing tasks/projects. In one class, two students made traffic lights with LED but towards the end of the session, they were unhappy so they dismantled it to start a new project so there was nothing to 'show' at the end, and I thought that was perfectly fine.

3. So what does a successful PEBL class look like?

"What happens if the light from the LED falls on the sensor controlling it?" A curious question from the girls

Students exploring their work from previous class while waiting for the teacher to arrive.

For me, I wait to see if students hang around at the end of the session or whether they rush out of the room. There were a group of students who would stay back. There were two girls called Chandani and Rita who were doing STEM activities for the first time. They would take materials home with them, make small project and bring them back to show me. One of their projects was a Christmas tree with LED lights. Another duo, Shankar and Sabin usually approached me before the class began and they would ask questions about modifications they could make to projects they had started in the PEBL sessions. One of their projects was a toy car which they had figured out a way to use the same motor to power all the wheels in the car using a pulley.

4. Are there any student stories that highlight growth or learning?

Sujan figuring out the design of launcher for his catapult

There were a few but there was a student named Sujan whose learning progress I was really happy with. He's a really creative young boy but not always confident with his ideas. I noticed that his project ideas were different from the rest of the class. But he kept discarding his ideas after looking around at the others and realizing he was doing it in a different way. Once I asked him why he changed his ideas and he told me he was just doing what the others were doing. But at the end of 10 weeks, he had gained confidence in his ideas and went with his gut and creativity and seemed to care less about doing the same project as his peers.

5. What did you learn as a teacher from facilitating this course?

This was the first time I facilitated the same group of learners over a period of time. Otherwise, I usually do one-off sessions with students. So I was able to build a pretty good relationship with the students. But I think I learned even more as a content designer. I was heavily involved in the design of PEBL classes, and facilitating these sessions gave me a chance to test those lesson designs. I learned a lot about the types of instructions that do and do not resonate with students. For instance, after I designed the hoop glider session, I had tested it myself and it worked pretty well and I thought it was a lot of fun to make as well. But when I was facilitating the session in class, I realized the instructions had too many variables that confused the students. The instructions were making too many suggestions on how to get the project to glide well. It was asking students to change the relative diameter, the length of the glider, and add wings to the side of the glider. Although those were suggestions, students ended up following all those instructions and wouldn't be able to discern which variables helped it fly best and which didn't.

I also got a lot of insights about lesson design from the periscope session. Usually, it's really difficult to fix the mirror securely on the periscope. Masking tape usually falls off and it's always a bit of a challenge. But during that session, I had unintentionally left rubber bands on students' tables. One group decided to pick up a rubber band and secure the mirror with it and it did a much better job than the masking tape had. Now we're going to switch the masking tape for rubber bands instead.

6. How effectively were you able to exchange ideas/experiences in the teacher community?

I really like the idea of teacher communities. There's always teachers with a lot more experience than me so I'm eager to attend their sessions and learn from them. They are good spaces to talk about education and learning and these spaces are rarely available. But I was a bit disappointed in the peer group because they would be late to sessions or not show up at all.

Interview with Akshay, facilitator and content designer/developer for the PEBL course.

1. Which lessons were the students most excited by?

I think they found the scribbler bot lesson to be the most interesting. There was a range of things we could discuss from physics concepts like vibrations and what was causing the motor to vibrate but also more broad ideas about how robots might work.But also in the balloon powered car lesson, students came up with pretty interesting thoughts to make sense of the why or why not their cars were moving. When we were testing the cars, one of the students pointed out that his moved the furthest because the body of his car was not touching the ground and so there was no resistance restricting the car’s movement. Another insight one of the students had was that their car was not moving because there was a leakage of air between the straw and the balloon used to power the car.

2. Did you observe any of these student insights transfer into their non-PEBL classes?

After we did the chromatography session with grade 6 - 8 students, they were introduced to the Acid, Base and Salt chapter in their usual science class. During one of those classes, a student was trying to explain how litmus papers change color in contact with acid or base. Even though he was in the 7th grade and it was the first time he had been introduced to the concept of ‘ions’, he talked about how the color change might have something to do with ions.He connected the idea with the previous lesson (Chromatography), how the water helps spread the color on a filter paper and use this idea to explain how the ions that are released in the water are also carried through the litmus paper and it reacts with the chemicals in the litmus paper to change its color. I I felt validated that the students were able to apply what they learnt in a previous lesson and be able to connect it with newer lessons to form an understanding.

3. How did being in the designing/developing team influence your facilitation?

I think being thoroughly familiar with the content really helped. Because we’d discussed in depth the objectives behind the smallest task or instruction, it helped in internalizing that the point was to learn rather than to finish. So right from the first session, I was focused on learning as accomplishment rather than on completion. This also led me to be flexible with the time I spent on certain lessons. I didn’t feel like I needed to finish a lesson within one class period. For example with the Greeting Cards lesson, I spent one session entirely on familiarizing the students to LEDs which most were playing with for the first time. We used two other sessions to then build the actual greeting cards.

4. What did you discover about yourself as a teacher/facilitator?

I used to have this philosophy about teaching and education where I placed ‘understanding’ at the center of learning. I thought that teaching and learning was about making sure all students in a classroom reached a certain level of understanding about the concepts being explored. I think with courses like PEBL, I’ve shifted my focus a bit and now think more about making the learning process enjoyable too. Personally, the LtP online course was very helpful in shaping that change. Before the course, I didn’t know what to look for in class and wasn’t sure if I was doing a good job as a teacher. The course provided categories and names for classroom behavior which was very insightful. It also validated that in fact playful learning was happening in my classrooms.

Students carefully listening to the Instructions for the paper tower challenge

Two students trying to come up with the idea of building a tower with an A4 sheet

Students excited to get the height of their paper tower measured. (post photo: this was the group that built the tallest tower standing around 71 cm)