By: Abby W.
Walking into a seminar each day, I always anticipate learning something new. I have never felt bored during any of my classes. However, the most captivating class I have taken so far was one that had “Design Hack” written on the board when I entered the room.
At first, I was skeptical but as we got to learn more about the process of design thinking, I was hooked. Design thinking was developed by students at Stanford d.school and is used to identify problems and come up with ideas to solve these problems. Using these skills that we learned, we got to make a game for a certain person. This process involved finding ways to improvise and solve problems quickly as we only had 3 hours to make this new and improved game.
Me and my team started by interviewing the person we were making this game for. We interviewed one of the teachers in our school who happens to be our student design teacher, Ms.Friedant. We got to ask many questions as we wanted to make this better game. As a group, we brainstormed different games with improvements and came up with a game that fit the needs of our players. We needed the game to be multiplayer and single-player, fun, engaging, and easy to follow. We ended up with a game that was like skee ball and a card game with challenges all mixed in one called Toss and Roll, Ms. Friedant style. The whole process took us about 2 and a half hours and became more complicated.
Although this was a group project, I think it was just as much about working alone. We first made an idea together but then worked alone for a bit. Without us branching off and making our own designs we wouldn’t have had all the good aspects of our project we came up with when we had time to ourselves. We also had to make many changes as we went. Our game involved rolling or tossing or rolling a ball into different spots for different point values just like skee ball. Along the way, we ran into many problems like how to get our borders to stay up and still have them able to come off the board to put it away. This caused us to have to think about what we were doing.
Overall this was a very fun thing to do and it turned out to be a good way to bond with my group as we worked together. I think the main takeaway that I took from this is that we are not always going to get things right the first time and you are going to have to go back on your process and retest till you get it right.
