22-23rd of November the Erasmus+ DesignIT project team met in Porto Polytechnic.
Project coordinator Kai Pata and Anet Põdra introduced the results of the interrim report and the team discussed how to meet the upcoming challenges.
Olivier Heidmann introduced the final developments the team has made with DesignIT tool. The tool is coming close to the planned functionalities and can be used now with different design challenges settings. The new features relate with gamified approach of motivating the players to submit the challenges according to the preplanned templates, doing peer-review to challenges to gain points, inviting the competing teams to contribute with ideas on their challenge (it takes off points), or asking advice from the game master (takes off points). The team is still working in developing the feature for the game master to easily get the overview of each players’ points in a table format. This will enable to see how each player worked in the team and for other teams. The overview of points has also a potential to be used for evaluating the effect of gamified design thinking process.
We had the discussion of the target groups and main value propositions of the DesignIT tool.
Carlos Vaz de Carvalho introduced the approach how the learning scenarios will be collected on templates. Each project partner country will contribute two learning scenarios in different contexts. We also discussed how to create the video library for Design thinking tool support.
Kai Pata lead the discussion of the evaluation of the DesignIT usage in different countries. So far in Fall 2018 the tool has been tested:
- Educational learning ecosystem engineering settings in Estonia with two groups and 27 students from Tallinn University
- Customer lead design challenges were tackled in Finland, Metropolia, using the design thinking canvases with the DesignIT tool
- The experiments have also started in Greece, with engineering and educational technology students, in this setting we can test out how the tool functions simultaneously with big groups and more that 20 challenges set during one course. To support this, some additional challenge-developing functionalities were developed in DesignIT tool.
The evaluation plan was made for Spring 2019, to ensure that in all partner countries 50 students could participate in testing DesignIT tool.
The second day team discussed the Dissemination activities and prepared the dissemination plan for year 2. Part of this dissemination plan we discussed how to scale up the project results to different target groups in different educational contexts – higher education, applied higher education, vocational education, secondary education, training sector. Part of our sustainability model in dissemination is developing the book of the best results of how higher education could use active and gamified learning methods.
The discussion was also made about the deployment of the tool and the sustainability of the results. The designIT tool will be running 5 years after the project in the current server, it is fully open to the educational sector. The DesignIT tool is an open source solution.