Overview
Purple Asparagus educates children, families and the community about eating that’s good for the body and the planet. Through exploration and discovery, they inspire a lasting love of delicious nutritious foods. My team and I were given the opportunity to engage students by creating a hands-on, exciting learning experience for PA students. We created an animated story and a few games which students will be granted a prize (eg. a Sticker) for answering correctly. This will create incentive and a fun experience for the students while learning about veggies along the way!
Project Length: October - December 2018
Client: Purple Asparagus
Role: UX Research +Product Design
Collaborators: Gopika Jalam, Inaara Carolia, Ismail Azam, Yoyo Ko
Tools Used: Photoshop, Google Slides
User Research
After secondary research and interviewing 6 stakeholders including: a first grader, Nutrition Science Major, 3 second grade teachers and a parent we found the following:
Key Insights:
- Children have healthy food habits but not due to a great knowledge of healthy foods, but because it is forced on them from their parents.
- Teachers were in favor of utilizing an interactive app instead of reading a book and suggested creating an incentive for going home and cooking these recipes to enforce healthy eating at home
- Teachers also emphasized capitalizing on children’s interest in storytelling as well as their desire to be involved and creative in the activities that are planned
- Parent realized having her children try small portions until they develop a taste works well with healthier foods.
Ideation
To address the problems of our users, we delved into brainstorming and ideation. We had a few five to ten minute brainstorming sessions to creatively think of solutions and then came together to synthesis ideas.
Some of our main ideas:
Some of our main ideas:
- Children like animated stories and a games so we can incorporate those things into the curriculum
- Must use technology that is low cost for school budgeting reasons so we decided to use a projector to show the animated story and iClickers for students to enter their response and win a prize
Prototyping
As a solution, we replaced the "Story Book Time" with an animated story and a few games which students will be granted a prize if answered correctly. This will create incentive and an interactive experience for the students while learning about healthy food and the effects on the body along the way!
I was involved with interviewing teachers, shadowing kindergartners, ideation and managing by delegating tasks. My team won the "Best Game" award after presenting our experience.
User Testing + Reflections
We user tested with a few primary school students within our network as regulations for classroom activities did not allow us to test in a classroom and Purple Asparagus is located in Chicago.
We received great feedback in terms of interest and excitement from the children. Users enjoyed the game but they were confused about the story which means we would have iterated again to clarify and expand upon the storyline.
