July was a month of research and experimenting.
User research: On the Ground
I was mainly based at a major English language school in London to talk to teachers and students about their language learning experience. On my first day, I was literally (again) thrown over the deep end when I had to go to the cafeteria, walk up to students I don't know and say, "Hi! I'm conducting research on an app. Do you have 5 minutes to spare?"
Yes, I was the annoying survey person who bothered people's days. Thankfully, most of the people who I approached were friendly enough to talk to me. But there was this group of girls who were like:
'We're eating lunch'. And as I am very sensitive by nature, I took that as a personal blow and didn't talk approach anyone for the rest of the day. But all in all, throughout my stay, I interviewed about 50 students all together. Not bad for an introvert.
I also talked to many teachers and sat in during their classes. What I could conclude from these encounters is man its hard to be a teacher! Getting students interested in the subject matter is a real feat. And there is also the non-stop preparations that they have to make before each class. If you're a teacher, I take my hat off to you. When I was a teacher in Kenya, I learnt teaching the hard way with 80 kids in a class and needless to say, I sucked at it - so whoever who successfully does it well is a hero in my eyes.
Design thinking workshops
It was this month too where I started organising a series of design thinking workshops. I had been very intrigued by their methodology and pitched to my boss to try it out with groups of teachers. And by using videos of IDEO teaching design thinking to Dartmouth students as main point of reference, I constructed the workshop to be able to get the most out of the participants in that limited time frame. And Alhamdulillah, I managed to organise 4 design thinking workshops with varying groups of teachers which produced alot of interesting and insightful data. The teachers found it helpful too as they found an efficient way to visualise and share their ideas.
UX
Also quite strangely, I found myself doing a bit of UX work with my very limited skills on Illustrator. Managed to sketch up a few feature prototypes to make visualising ideas much easier. Its always good to discover new skills in the process. Through this, I found out that I really love visualising ideas or making thoughts easily understood by others. These are challenges that I find exhilarating so when I am designing something for this purpose, I become so focused at the task that I rarely talk to anyone till I'm done. And when people talk to me when I'm in the zone, I will give them one word answers. Weird, but true. Hopefully I won't bring this trait with me in medicine.
Education Fair
In between those workshops somewhere was the booth at Digital Summer Camp. If I can describe that day in one word, it would have been: chaos. The main aim of the booth was to engage the students as much as possible using music and language, so I had an idea to hold a competition where there were 25 jumbled lines of lyrics from 25 different songs - and the person who got the most songs right won an ipod shuffle. Needless to say, the booth was packed with students all throughout the day - each one of them cracking their brains and humming tunes in efforts to remember where these lyrics came from. In the end, I had to go through about 70 entries to pick a winner. But that day was beyond tiring because it was also the first week of the fasting month with 18+hours waterless and foodless in the English summer heat. Somehow rather, I survived!
And just like that, July came to an end, just like June did.
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