If you’ve been up to date with all my blogs, you would have seen this one coming. This is the last official blue sky of 2017, click here to see the last one.

So this time we were given the topics of blue sky about a week before spring break (which was in March) This year was a little bit different from the rest, we were given four different age groups to target. Seniors, Pets, tweens and finally babies and kids. For each age group, we had to find a problem and try to solve it, the solution had to resolve in three prototypes. Each prototype had to be tested out by that age group that they chose.

A while ago I saw a Cheerios commercial, it proved that bees were an important part of our everyday life and that the world would change a lot without them. This got me thinking about how many people actually knew about what bees do for us. I thought this would be a great blue sky idea, the only problem was that it was probably impossible to solve the bee crisis in less than a month. I had to come up with an achievable idea that would target a certain audience group. With a little bit of help, I came up with an idea. The idea was that I was going to come up with an education plan for young children to teach them about the importance of bees. Since this project was slightly bigger than most, it ended up being a partner project with my friend Kate.

The first step to this was researching factors of an engaging presentation. Since we were going to have to present to young kids each time the presentation had to be extra engaging. Our first prototype was okay since we didn’t want to show up to a class not knowing if the presentation was good enough, we decided to peer critique the first one. Anyways, take a look for yourself,

Overall our classmates told us that everything was good it was just that we had way, way, way too many words on each slide. And that maybe getting rid of those words could help out with the engagement of the kids. With the research and experiences from people who have come into our classes, we found out that it’s actually helpful to break up some sections with some worksheets so that the kids don’t get disengaged. So, in the end, our presentation included a few worksheets, keynote and finally some seeds. We decided to include the seeds because we wanted to make the kids feel like they were helping out, and hopefully to spark up a conversation with their parents about what’s happening. Here’s the second prototype!

Finally the last prototype, for this one we were given a feedback sheet from the actual teachers of the classes we went to talk to. The feedback sheet basically talked about our tone of voice, engagement, kids understanding, and quality of information. Once they were done filling it out they basically told us our presentation skills (tone, clarity etc.) were very good and we kept the kids engaged. The only thing they recommended was to include a little more information about how the pollination works, and how crops need their nutrients (since that’s what affected them the most) So after we added a few extra slides about the pollination steps, importance etc… so here it is, the final prototype!

For the exhibition night, we decided to create a poster board which would include our trail of thought, ideas, and lesson plan. We also planned to include our keynote and seeds as a hands-on part of our presentation.

Finally like always we had to create a theme to the exhibition since our groups target audience was babies and toddlers we put together a little daycare themed room. We had everything from animal crackers and juice boxes, to toy story and Lego.

Besides everything else, this year was also a little different. In the end, we had to write a little journal about the whole process, it started at the very beginning of our idea process, to our very last prototype. When everything is done we will be adding it to a iBook, hopefully, it will be up soon so that everybody can read it!

Overall everything went really well, and I’m really proud of all the work we have done throughout the project!