About this project

Design thinking and process

When I go grocery shopping, I always see a lot of kids in the troller without a mask. According to U.S. Center for Diseases Control and Prevention, compared with 5—17-year-olds, the rate of death is 45 times higher in 30—39-year-olds and 8,700 times higher in 85+-year-olds. 

However, children have less knowledge compared to adults on how to stay safe. Children’s behaviors such as touching their faces might carry the virus to the home and therefore might put the family members in great danger. Even for young children, who are of a lower risk of getting infected or hospitalized, it is still extremely important to educate them how to keep themselves and their family safe during the pandemic with all the reasons explained. 

I decide to make an animated quiz targeted at children by using situation-based stories of depicting a girl named Lily going on her grocery shopping trip. The story-based quiz can be a great tool for young learners to assess their existing knowledge about safety tips by recalling their memories based on their experiences with their parents. Additionally, children will be able to apply those tips next time when they go grocery shopping with their caregivers with the tips learned in the quiz. Conversation-style explanations can be essential for young children to understand the “why” of those safety precautions, and boost their learning outcomes as if they are talking to real people. 

Design rationales

Mayer's Cognitive Theory of Multimedia Learning (CTML)

The design of this project follows a number of Mayer’s CTML design principles and visual design principles in order to create a clean and effective design to reduce the extraneous load and maximize germane load when users are using the app. Here is a list of CTML principles I used for this prototype:

• Multimedia Principle: people learn better with text and pictures than just text. The background pictures provide the users a sense of the particular situations the character Lily is in, and correspondingly draw the knowledge in their long-term memory to determine what are the right answers for Lily to perform. The addition of audio such as washing hands and ambience noise at grocery stores is also used as a way to enhance learning by utilizing the learners’ auditory and sensory channels.

• Segmenting Principle: The entire quiz is short and divided into five scenarios with explicit hints of what the situations are. The segmentation of different questions (topics) by pictures and introductory sentences helps to offload the cognitive load from the users so that the users will be learning in user-paced segments rather than as a continuous unit.

• Temporal Contiguity Principle: The text and corresponding pictures are designed to be next to each other, in order to provide a better environment for learners to retrieve the knowledge from their long-term memory.

Situated learning theory

The concept of Situated Learning Theory is that learning occurs within an authentic context, culture, and activity and that it is widely unintentional. This design comes up with scenarios that almost everyone has the access to as the context where the learning starts. Learners can easily retrieve their memories from their prior experiences or implement safety measures in those situations if those are something the learners do not know. Jane Lave, who developed the theory with her other colleagues, believed that learning experiences can be best enhanced when the activities are based on real-life experiences.

Limitations and future work

Due to the time constraints and some technical difficulties, the prototype did not really meet my expectations in terms of interactivity and animations. Also, due to Scratch’s limited functionality, stock images and audio, there is not enough freedom for me to play around with the storyline that I have developed an easier story that I can develop at the end with Scratch. I have to search for royalty-free illustrations, which came up pixilated in Scratch. If possible, I would like to do:

• Conduct research first on children of 5 to 10 years old on their knowledge of COVID safety tips and precautions

• Develop an interesting and engaging storyline with children's book writers, kindergarten teachers, or any instructional experts in early education.

• Ask illustrators to draw more personalized and polished background images, characters with different postures.

• Ask programmers to use programming languages to develop an interactive quiz story embedded with instructional multimedia such as narrations, audio effects, images/illustrations, etc.