Description
Participants play with, break apart and modify mobile apps in order to understand how they work as systems. This teaching kit is designed to explore a few activities that can be mixed and mashed into workshops for teens or adults who want to design mobile apps. Participants will tinker with paper prototyping, design mindmaps and program apps with Appmaker while learning basic design and webmaking concepts.
Big Ideas
- Design can be a collaborative response to an inquiry or a problem.
- Systems can be broken down into parts (components, core mechanics, goals, rules, space and choice).
- Inspiration and ideas can come from anywhere.
- Designing for a mobile experience provides unique affordances.
- User testing allows teams to see what improvements can be made to make designs more delightful to use in real time.
- Brainstorming helps you to work with peers to kickstart an idea or concept for a design.
Agenda
For these workshops, we have broken down mobile design into three groups of activities:
Learning objectives
- Develop a basic understanding of interdependent components that make up a system
- Gain an understanding of the concept of empathy
- Differentiate between devices that one might design for and evaluate which is appropriate for the particular solution in question.
- Develop key design vocabulary
The concrete Web Literacy skills that will be developed are in the domains of Building and Connecting
Essential Questions
- What makes a good design opportunity?
- Who is the app for?
- What is the opportunity?
- What is the solution?
- How does the user affect your design decision?
- Is your medium choice appropriate for your solution?
Assessment and review
You can get an idea of whether learners have gained from this session by noticing if a learner:
- Demonstrates knowledge gained through hands-on activities, games or discussion.
- Works collaboratively and openly with others to complete activities or tasks.
- Uses creative methods to build technological skills in novel and unexpected ways.