This weekend I was invited as a guest to join Fitri Mohamad‘s Masters in Learning Sciences class to participate in a design sprint for the creation of educational activities. The session forms part of an ACES case study being undertaken to evaluate the effectiveness of playful learning and frugal education aspects when designing and delivering educational activities.
The participants for this sprint session were comprised mainly of teachers and lecturers from across Malaysia, specialising in a wide range of subjects including physics, maths, and language learning, amongst others. As part of the sprint, Fitri incorporated the Frugal Education Action Cards as tool to support the ideation process, encouraging participants to consider frugal aspects when formulating their learning designs.
The class referenced the card deck, using the cards to help shape their ideas and designs, prompted by the results of a “How Might We” Sprint activity they had just undertaken. At this initial stage of the learning design process, the task focused primarily on the use of the ‘Creative’ and ‘Collaborative’ frugal aspects as design aids, however, participants could also refer to the full deck for inspiration.
For this sprint introduction, the class focused collectively on a single topic. In this case, the topic was challenges for addressing female engagement in physics activities, chosen as an example problem to introduce the class to the Sprint ideation process. Through their experience participating in the activity, the participants will apply the same, or a similar approach, when creating learning designs as part of their Masters coursework assignments. Hopefully the frugal cards will prove to be a valuable tool in supporting the education design process.
The activity went very well and the participants came up with many potential solutions to help address the challenge they identified during the ‘How Might We’ activity. You can see an example of their collaborative brainstorming in action in the animation above.
I would just like to say thanks Fitri and all participants involved in the class for letting me join their class and observe the cards being used. I look forward to seeing what they create in the coming months.
Side note: We had a good laugh together when I explained to the class that, even though I had designed and developed the frugal cards, I was working from an A3 printout of the cards as I didn’t – and still don’t – have a set of my own! Fitri and the CreativeCulture team at UNIMAS have been amazing and printed out physical sets of cards for their MA students using my PDF prototypes. 🙌