Phase 2: Week 5 New Valley High School

02/28 Sunday

🌹 Rose:

• Finished interviews with siblings
• Good to connect with laurie
• Being a part of MK interviews gave good perspective
• At this point our team has interviewed many people

🌱 Bud:

• Principal and student interviews
• Excited to get into all of this research material but we may need to divide this between us
• Our team is taking a good amount of initiative on prepping for Fridays upcoming interview
• Excited to find a shared vision

🌵 Thorn:

• Hard to follow the professor at times, further clarification may be necessary in terms of futuring
• Presentation next monday, and we need to do a fair bit of synthesis
• All team members should feel empowered to speak up in class
• More collaboration with other team is necessary

Initial Prepping for Santa Clara Interviews

Our team began laying out the framework for how the research protocol with the students at New Valley Continuation High School may look like. As the students were likely to be minors it made sense to protect their anonymity and not record the session nor their names or faces. With only forty five minutes to speak with the students we recognized that we would need to be critical of what questions needed to be asked in a standard interview function and what could be pushed into another form. There was also an issue with the sheer volume of students compared to those in our team. There was likely going to be anywhere between ten to twenty students present. Thus even if we used every team member and split them into pairs to make four breakout rooms each room then would have anywhere from two to five students. We had planned for a traditional interview setting but this was going to require us adjusting our questions to allow the students to play off of each other as well. Our team built out an initial framework as well as a few ideas for how to gather information in novel ways and shared this with the other team, planning to get further feedback the next day.

03/01 Monday

With the next presentation coming up in a week we spoke with Peter to get more advice on how we could prepare and where we should be at in our process. While our team had acquired a large large body of knowledge we had yet to properly synthesize our newer findings into actionable steps. Furthermore we would not be able to do the primary research synthesis until we finished our interview on Friday of the New Valley High School and got a better idea of the communities there.

Peter directed us that the research we had done so far may still hold key insights and to push ahead with the synthesis. He also told us to be open and candid about what questions we have answers for and what we are still trying to discover. From there we spoke further about futuring design techniques to help with synthesis as well as transition design techniques. It is one thing to create an idea of an ideal future. It is quite another to plan for how to get there.

Discussion with The Zoomers

We were able to meet and discuss our concerns from Sunday with The Zoomers and refine our research protocol further. We had to significantly reduce the number of questions we were asking in person and ended up discussing if we wanted to shift some over to a survey or perhaps a chatterfal for an icebreaker activity before going into breakout rooms. While chatterfal has been productive in our own classes it would not actually be anonymous so that posed further complications.

As this video call on Friday would be orchestrated by the principal at NVH on Google Meet we needed to figure out what team members were doing what and, frankly, how Google Meets even worked as none of us had experience with it.

03/02 Tuesday

We resolved to speak with Hajira and Sofia a pair of PhD students here at CMU who also taught our Research Methods class for further insights. We discussed ways to protect the students anonymity, show respect to them and engage them further through ice breakers and alternative research activities. Through this discussion we landed upon The Pulock Game or Where Do You Stand and chose to set it up and practice it the next day on Google Boards.

03/03 Wednesday

Our teams finished and submitted our survey to NVH for the students to fill out before the interviews. With feedback beginning to trickle in we went to Peter for feedback on our dry run of the presentation we had prepared.

While we had created a rough presentation of what findings we had found it became clear that there were issues that needed to be addressed. Some of the future focusing findings from secondary research needed to be tailored more to our prompt. Our secondary research showed our findings but neglected to show any of the process and thus felt insubstantial. The entire presentation lacked visual communication and was too text heavy. In order to engage our audience we needed to make a shift here.

It was also clear that though we had organized by the type of research we had conducted as we progressed we may wish to make this more fluid. In doing so we could tell the story of our process instead of focusing on simple categories.

Friday Prep

Our two teams came together to practice using Google Meet and Boards. Adjusting to the platforms differences from Zoom was challenging at times but our teams were in high spirits and found fun in the situation.

From there we began practicing how to facilitate The Pulock Game. We needed to take up only about ten minutes worth of time and make the process easy for the students. Initially we practiced with dots but eventually settled on emojis to have more fun with it and to track what students said about their feelings about the present vs how they feel about the future.

03/05 Friday New Valley High School Interviews

With about a week and a half of preparation our teams were finally ready to conduct the interviews. We began with our interview of Laurie the school principal. Peter facilitated this forty five minute interview with Lulin on as the official note taker and John and Yeuru also taking notes. As we promised both the principal and students a certain level of anonymity I shall not go into the details of what any of them have discussed on a personal level. Laurie was clearly passionate about her school and knew a surprising amount about design thinking and projecting into the future.

As this was a continuation school many students had difficulties succeeding in a traditional learning environment. This could have been due to different learning styles that the typically rigid academic structure will not account for. There are also many students coming in with special needs and trauma in their past.

After interviewing Laurie we took a short break and then began our forty five minutes with the students.

NVH Student Interviews

In the end there was seventeen students that were able to show up to the interviews. We began with Karen facilitating The Polak Game to see how hopeful and in control students felt about the world around them now vs in the future.

While there were some technical difficulties in students being able to select and move their emojis when overlapping we were able to move on from this exercise to the breakout rooms in order to conduct our interviews.

Due to some technical constraints while we were able to ensure that at least two members were present in each room we were not able to choose who went into which rooms so our initial plans for who was going to do what got scrambled. Thankfully once we all reconvened after the event it appears that this did not pose any serious challenge to any one room. Some rooms did face challenges though. Certain rooms had as difficult time getting students to speak, some students only wanted to communicate with chat and some team members had connection issues. However imperfect our execution may have been we all left those interviews elated with the insights of seventeen high schoolers and one principal.

The next step will then be to show our progress to Fiona on Monday and begin our research synthesis.