To prepare for our research phase, we defined the initial scope of our project by identifying the preliminary problem that we wanted to address, as well as our potential target audience. We began by outlining the problem space we were interested in, and what we aimed to accomplish.
The initial problem space we wanted to explore was online education for elementary school students. Though we didn't understand the specific issues in this subject area, we recognized that the COVID-19 pandemic caused a shift in how younger children learn and engage with their education due to the remote classroom format.
The challenge that we decided to solve for was to create an educational tool that enhances the online learning experience. To start with, we established a target audience of students aged 5-10 who typically didn't require the use of online tools prior to the pandemic.
After discussing amongst ourselves and deciding on a direction that we wanted to take, we established a motivating question that we were hoping to solve for:
How can we enhance the quality of virtual learning for children?
From here, we established our target audience to be elementary school students, aged 5-7, and hoped to involve teacher and parent relationships as they were the most involved in these students' learning experiences. We wanted our solution to aid in the learning experience for students during the pandemic, and beyond with the use of existing technology today.