After receiving our assignment briefs from our class lecture, we then decided on our team and thought it would be good to meet up and start brainstorming ideas and making sense of the assignment brief. After reading it we found that our problem that we will be trying to solve is

COVID-19 has caused widespread disruption to schooling for over 18 months and this is likely to continue for some time. Many institutions were forced to embrace remote and online learning during the pandemic.

We then decided that we would brainstorm different things like what our application could be e.g. either an app or on a website, the different places it could be used, like at home, or a coffee shop, basically anywhere that has an internet connection. We looked at all the different devices it could be used on e.g. smartphones, tablets, PCs and laptops and we even went as far as VR and AR although it was more of a far out idea. Also we looked at who it could be made for the likes of primary students, secondary students, university, teachers or parents/carers.

Finally we looked at the different pros and cons of remote learning. We found that there are more cons than pros too remote learning. Thinking of the cons was easier as we had first hand experience of remote learning during the pandemic, so by coming up with all these different cons we certain aspects we can incorporate into our application that will combat all the cons.

After this we started brainstorming our product ideas. Again we talked briefly about how we could do VR or AR but it seems like the harder idea. We then decided that our application will have platform sharing that will allow students and teachers to have video calls, have separate places for groups if group work is being done, incorporate messaging between students and teachers and allow for research sharing.

We then looked at the application itself and all its different features that it will have. It will allow for teachers to add different digital books for pupils to read or allow them to each have an online copy of a book that the whole class is reading. It will have a whiteboard much like on miro that will allow teachers and pupils to interact and learn together. As I said previous it will allow for group video calls, messaging between teachers students and different groups for group projects. Our app will also allow students to access previous recordings from different classes like maths or english lessons. The app will also be accessible too laptops/PCs, tablets and smartphones.

After our brainstorming was done we carried out a task that we learnt last year that was created by IDFEO, where you frame your design challenge and answer different questions.

The first question we answered was

COVID-19 has caused widespread disruption to schooling for over 18 months and this is likely to continue for some time. Many institutions were forced to embrace remote and online learning during the pandemic.

The next question we answered was what are some possible solutions to your problems, we came up with 6 different ideas of ways we could solve our problem. We decided though that a few of our ideas could be incorporated together to make the one idea.

After we then framed our problem as a design question that we can work off.