Writing Space for Young Learners
When the New Literacy portfolio was developing a new teacher and student platform, the aim was to enhance the writing experience. This online writing space would include multiple steps from brainstorming and idea generating to planning, drafting, revisioning and editing. Additionally, we aimed to support students in understanding the elements of good writing, ranging from constricting grammatical sentences to crafting more sophisticated writing. The overarching question of this Sprint was “How might we support students to be good writers in a variety of genres and for a variety of purposes?”
Stage 1: Thinking and Planning
The decision was to separate the writing expierience into several stages: Think and Plan, Draft, Revise and Edit, and finally Publish and Evaluate. During this stage, we implemented a Process Word Cloud exercise to determine what students need to do and what tools students might need at each stage.
Transitioning from conceptual thinking to visual solutioning involved building an inspiration board. This exercise focused on understanding available tools and existing success stories by examining our competitive market and learning from industry trends.
Stage 2: Drafting
The next exercise was Crazy 8, it aimed at generating eight distinct ideas in eight minutes. This encouraged pushing beyond initial ideas to generate a wide variety of solutions, such as progress tracking, error highlights, engaging quests. The subsequent team discussion, enriched by cross-functional expertise, was highly productive. Comments addressed editorial content, UX principles, accessibility, and product design. The team voted on the most successful sketch and idea, which informed the development of the next stage.
Solution sketches were based on the most voted sketch and idea from the Crazy 8 stage. This process allowed the team to analyze and provide detailed, and thought-through solutions to Navigation (stage chunking, personalization), UX (user-flow), and Pedagogy (error-handling, feedback, reading/writing connection). Prototypes were created using tools like Figma and tested with real users to ensure a seamless drafting experience.
Are you curious to discover how we incorporated this writing experience sprint into an engaging platform? Let me take you through the journey of platform wireframing and story boarding.