Class Crossover Final

A Collection of Resources

In preparation for next semester, I've spent some time looking into the materials that already exist in relation to what I want to do for my senior thesis. Pinterest has been a valuable resource in this search.

Here is my collection so far.

This folder includes individual activities, links to both parents and teacher resources, possible books that I could read, and websites with more compilations of resources. It's pretty much a goldmine for information.

So far I have been in contact with the kindergarten faculty at Prairie Trail Elementary. This is the school my mother works at, in Texas. They're excited to answer my questions as I come up with them, as well as send me any resources that might be useful.

Moving forward, I will begin looking into other forms of education besides public schools.

Waldorf (Steiner) Education

Montessori Education

The Therapeutic Process of Play

A Thesis Proposal

School demands a lot from kids these days. And I don’t mean us. I mean, from the get-go, in early education, kids are expected to enter the system already having an understanding of their shapes, colors, letters, etc. Children who attend daycares tend to be more prepared in this area. But as for at-home involvement, there’s often a lack of exposure to the academics that they are now expected to already know.

Children and early childhood development are things that I am particularly passionate about. That being said, I would like to take my senior thesis project as an opportunity to address the issue at hand.

The age I would like to work with is 3-5 year olds (and of course their parents). At this age, they are beginning to develop essential skills like fine and gross motor skills, letters, sounds, colors, shapes, and social acclamation. Through interviews with teachers and perhaps day-care workers, I could like to collect, refine, and catalog the best activities to help children be prepared when they get to school. I have also started collecting from the vast, but incredibly cluttered and confusing, list of early childhood development resources that are on the web.

I imagine this can be applied to many things graphically, which is another reason to be excited. Web and electronic devices are something that children become familiar with at a VERY early age. Also, more tangible items such as branding, books perhaps some packaging (for activities or toys) could be artifacts that I tackle graphically. Very exciting!

Screen Space Reading

Designing for the screen comes with it's own set of limiting rules, mostly limited by the capabilities of the code or the physical attributes of the screen itself. This has let much of the design for the screen to end up being "streamlined shapes, a rejection of ornaments, an appeal to minimalism, to functionalism." It is an easy task to design on the screen, within the screen, imagining everything as flat. But the internet is anything but flat. A screen is nothing but a frame. It's a border, but one that we can, and must, cross.
In an interactive environment, time is something that is lost. This, also, is something of a disconnect, as the idea of temporal experiences dictate the rest of our lives.

Group 1 Touchpoints, Moving Slowly but Surely.

Doing several iterations, trying to give myself some options.

Class Crossover - iPhone design and some wireframes

So here's our first go at the iPhone portion of our MX system. We decided to get it out of the way early, since this is the only scenario that uses it. Once this is finished with, each of us and really focus each on one of the bigger platforms.
 Gps iPhone Scenario


Moving forward, we will be turning the rest of our scenarios into designs! Here are the wireframe versions of the two of mine that have yet to be done. Unfortunately, the PDF of the iPhone wireframe somehow became corrupted, but that's ok, since I've still got the original files.  Brandon will be focusing his attention on the iPad, I will be doing the hub for our parent and teacher scenarios! Teacher Lesson Plans Note Sharing

IN SPAAAACE

New Early Birds Mascot?

Probably not.

3D Navigation Model

Instead of trying to explain our pile of dots through photographs alone, I thought it might be helpful to just make a quick video instead. Thank you Loren for being my cameraman!

Phase 2 Final

In order to begin the rebranding process, I first refined the objective statement for Half-Price books.

"Through rebranding Half Price Books, I would like to downplay their emphasis of affordability while raising awareness of their strong roots in the green movement, all while using playful and nostalgic aesthetics to appeal to a book-loving audience."
Keeping the key attributes (playful, nostalgic, and eco-friendliness) in mind, I began the iterative process of creating the 3 different directions. That is, after changing the name to “Early Birds.” The intention of this change was to meet the part of my objective that states to “downplay their emphasis of affordability.”

One direction personifies the letter “e,” turning it in a light and playful bird. The second direction that I pursued is a more solid, formal brandmark that took the shape of both a book and the initials of the new company name. The third direction, which I now intend to move forward with, simply consists of a monogram. The supporting elements of each brand fill out the attributes that the brandmarks did not cover. Check out the scribd for all the details!

Kelsey Anderson Phase 2

Matrix of Refinements

Refined Wireframes

Student is around town and completes location-based educational opportunities:

Student takes notes within textbook and then requests to share notes with peers:

Teacher uses keywords in the students' discussions to find new materials store in a teacher-submitted database for future lesson plans. This one was initially for the ipad, but was then moved to be a desk-top scenario:

Initial Wireframes

Final research posters.

The final posters have all the tweaks and refinements made to them, resolving issues with hierarchy as well as some tinier issues like copywriting!

Research Poster: Round 3

To refine the posters further, we worked on fixing all the levels of hierarchy we had last time because of the colors (the bright yellow really popping out) as well as some scaling issues that I had. On to the final!

Branding tweaks

Research Poster, refining!

 Here is the next iteration of the research posters. We took some time to comb through the type and edit a lot of it down, trying to avoid large, dense masses of text. For this new version, we also added a lot more of the hand-rendered type, although it could still use some refinements. Still, the idea is there! While working on this, we are trying to keep an eye on both our research and our mood board, so to make sure that it accurately reflects our audience!

Poster Draft 1

This is the first draft of the research poster. Lots of dots and lots of text. But the hand-rendered text is nice, thanks to Brandon! I am working on the individual side while he manages the community half. Meet Charlie and Eyelyn, middle-schoolers in a classroom crossover!

3 directions, first round of iterating