Today, we went to Temple Primary school. We prepared for it by buying soda from the soda wholesaler, and then we bought some bread. We had three teams come in, the first two of 5 boys, 5 girls, and the last of 5 boys and 3 girls. After we did this activity, we all went home and crashed.
The school itself was actually pretty gorgeous. It has the similar layout to the CYEC, though much better kept. All of the students were in uniform, something I had experienced first-hand in the States. It didn’t quite work as well here, however, since there were still obvious indicators of income (one of the main purposes of a uniform in my mind).
The activity went well from our perspective. The students seemed engaged in the activity (even though they were staying even longer at school… on a Saturday), and it was fantastic to have some more data on exclusively female groups. The main takeaway from the activities was, once again, the importance of fun when it comes to being creative. There was one female group that, by my standards, had a particularly overbearing leader. She was calling most of the shots, made sure everything was organized to the t, and seemed to be directing the group without much consideration for others’ ideas (it’s a little hard for me to say this with much conviction since most of the conversation was in another language). But there was this one girl, who decided to kinda do her own thing, and began simply playing around with the connectors she had before her. Eventually, she created something that made her laugh, which she showed to the rest of the group, jokingly. But that small act of play made all the difference. Up until that point the group had been struggling with coming up with any ideas for what to build, and their one major attempt was scrapped due to geometric issues. Even though we only have one documented creation after this point, the change in attitude of the group was remarkable. Soon, the other group members were creating their own versions of what the first girl had made, and they all finally started to look like they were having a good time. The other, more complicated, side to this particular example was the fact that the creation we documented from that group was actually the variation the leader made on the first girl’s creation. We’re constantly re-evaluating our research methodology as we’re going through this, so to me this indicates a glaring, yet revealing, flaw. How many other creations have we misattributed to the “leader” of the group? How many creations have we missed, simply because play was squelched by the “vision” of the most influential group member? One of the potential directions we could go with this project in the future is supplementing the hand-written notes with video, which would allow us to revisit the activity over and over again, revealing new insights with each fresh viewing that we may have missed in the moment. Video has been a tool used by designers for a long time, and it’s a tool that could benefit us greatly as well.
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