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This project aims to improve the Interdisciplinary Projects (IPRO) 397 class experience by understanding what drives learning and motivating students to be more engaged during class. Students in this class work on self-picked projects and learn design thinking methodology in order to generate more human-centered insights and solutions

Project Team: Michele Hess, Woo-Hyun Kim, Patricia Wang, Selena Xu, Chia-ling Yu
Faculty Advisors: Jeremy Alexis, David McGaw

Key Role: research, analysis/synthesis, interviews and prototyping, concepts and insights, business models, presentation design 

We looked into principles of prize design, and how other educational institutions are incorporating prize design as means to engage and motivate students.

Context Research: studied current iPRO 397 class structure compare to other traditional iPRO classes. Looked through trends of education and how prize/competition is used to encourage students participation. Looked into reality TV, gaming, competition for clues to generate excitement and motivation for learning.

Primary Research: interviewed faculty members from iPRO 397 and traditional iPRO classes. Observed several iPRO 397 sessions, interacted with students through quick survey, casual chat and probe activities. Prototyped, test and modified our initial ideas with card sorting with students. Participated in iPRO day competition as judges.

Frameworks: several frameworks were used to analyze/synthesize our findings and generate concept ideas. 

From interviews and observations with students and teachers of iPRO 397 class, we draw up this semantic profile diagram to identify areas of interest and improvement for our concept ideas. 

This framework was used to synthesize our initial perception of iPRO 397 class from contextual search, then our believe after observation of class interaction and chat with different stakeholders, where we then developed our hunch of areas we can probe further to generate ideas.

From various frameworks used to analyze and synthesize our findings, we developed a framework for concept generation with design principles for Class Structure, Interaction, and Impact.

We further refine our ideas into 3 buckets, Class Structure, Competition and Celebration and tested our initial ideas with students through quick card sorting. We wanted to get direct feedback from students, to understand what they liked and disliked about each idea, to see what resonated with them more, so we can further refine our ideas into bigger concepts.

From the idea tested with the students, we came up with a framework to map the ideas on level of difficulty for implementation and its potential impact. We then grouped  these smaller ideas into 4 bigger concepts.

Concept 1: IPRO Bucks
- incremental prizes leading to a big prize
- most improved prize
- hired for a day by peers

Concept 2: IPRO Elite/Fellowship
- invitation only IPRO class
- students are directed to find stakeholders
- meaningful mentor relationships

Concept 3: IPRO Pre-Entrepreneurship
- youtube video lectures
- starting an innovation incubator
- internship interview with potential employers

Concept 4: IPRO Unbound
- students are direct to find stakeholders
- installation at the museum of science and industry
- presenting during graduation

In this concept, teams compete in 4 sessions with increasing point system, so underdogs still have a chance to catch up in later stages. Leveraging little surprises (prize/penalty) along the way to keep the  teams engaged, excited, and to maintain the momentum throughout the course.

This concept is to make IPRO 397 an exclusive, prestigious and thought-after experience. Only open to the very highly motivated, competitive students. 

This concept aims to make a student project into reality. The class is devised into two semesters. Semester 1: teams concentrate on developing a solid concept through rigorous design thinking process and to raise enough funds for concept prototyping phase in semester 2. Only teams raised enough funds proceed to 2nd semester with a chance to pitch and sell their concepts into potential investors.

This concept uses current situation/real urging problems facing the world now as a way for teams to solve and serve the greater community/society and create real social impact. The concept focuses on hands-on learning with field experts to solve for meaningful needs for specific community.

Various funding options were created to support the new concepts.