Multiple Design Ideas and Parallel Prototyping

“When people create multiple alternatives in parallel, they produce higher-quality, more-diverse work and experience a greater increase in self-efficacy.” —Dow, S. P., Glassco, A., Kass, J., Schwarz, M., Schwartz, D. L., and Klemmer, S. R. (2010.) ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction, Vol. 17, No. 4, Article 18

First, the definition:“ Parallel Prototyping” is the process of considering a range of potential design ideas simultaneously before selecting and refining one specific design approach. When applied before iterative design, parallel prototyping enables teams to more fully experiment with and investigate a wide range of opportunities in a design space. It can also help designers to avoid becoming fixated on a design, and avoid “hill climbing” toward a less superior result, which has been a long-standing criticism of the iterative design methodology. (Bella Martin, Bruce Hanington 2012)

According to S.P. Dow et al, theoretical benefits of parallel design:

·         Promote Comparison

·         Encourage Exploration

·         Foster Design Confidence

Contrasting the parallel design is the serial design: among multiple designs at the beginning, only one design concept is ever considered. This one design is repeatedly critiqued and revised. The only difference between the two conditions above was a matter of when participants received a critique on their ideas, after each concept or after multiple creations.

The following graphics explain the two different processes:

Fig. 1. The experiment manipulates when participants receive feedback during a design process: in serial after each design (top) versus in parallel on three, then two (bottom).

Fig. 2. Procedure for serial and parallel conditions, with timing.

Our goal is to combine the parallel design with our group’s (Sungmin and I) educational challenge question. As mentioned in my last blog, our challenge question is “how to overcome students' achievement gap caused by their family background”, such as (1) Parental education, (2) Parental occupation, (3) Home educational resources, (4) Home possession related to classical culture, (5) Books at home, and (6) Wealth. We decided to focus on the middle 3 items (i.e., Home educational resources, Home possession related classical culture, and Books at home).

During our last class meeting, we received tons of invaluable feedbacks and productive comments from our classmates. These helpful feedbacks all contributed to improve or rebuild our prototype.

We consider using technologies at the classroom level and the school level would be one of many possible ways to get over the gap. At least at the very beginning, the students would be supposed to be equally exposed to these resources. Furthermore, if students were provided with an opportunity to access these technologies later on through continuing school programs, such as after-school activity, equality in education in terms of educational resources would be guaranteed to some extent. For example, each classroom would be equipped with a lot of mobile devices (e.g., iPad) and students could have a free access to these devices. Teachers provide education mobile apps, which contain content knowledge or on-line resources (e.g., e-library information) for students. Or students could be invited to a virtual museum or music performance. All of these possibilities could contribute to reducing students' achievement gap to some degree. Besides, we are thinking about a “big family study plan”, or a “resource-sharing plan”, that is, different families (a mix of low-income, mid-class as well as affluent families) take turns to take care of a group that consists of 5 to 8 children on weekdays after school. On one side, the students can study in groups, having more interactions with each other, sharing ideas as well as learning materials and expensive devices. On the other side, this approach would provide more free time for parents; they only need to take care of the group of students once per week.


Since integrating the parallel approach into design practicum can inculcate healthy prototyping habits and help foster a positive outlook toward critique. We hope that by learning and using parallel design, we could gain more feedbacks then come up with a perfect, useful and practical solution to our challenge.

Equality of educational opportunity. (slides part by Zhang and Moon)

Educational challenge: equality of educational opportunity

                                                                    Xiaofan (Chloe) Zhang & Sungmin Moon

Equality of opportunity for all citizens is a major concern in all open societies (Roemer’s work as cited in Woessmann, 2004). The importance of educational performance for future income and productivity of individuals and societies has been documented by a large literature (Bishop 1992; Card 1999). However, so many previous researches show that the children from affluent family are more likely to succeed in school and in life than those from poor family. A most recent research on PISA revealed that more than 30 percent of variation in student achievement depends on their family background (Schmidt, 2014). One of the most intuitive explanations for this difference was that rich parents can spend more (including home resources for their children’s study) than poor parents on their children and these investments lead to better outcomes for their children. In other words, students of low-status families may lack the educational environment outside of schools and this may be a critical factor in the educational opportunity in overcoming the achievement gap (Nonoyama-Tarumi, 2007).

One of the most accurate predictors of student achievement is the extent of which the family is involved in their children’s education. In terms of the effect of family on student achievement, there are two categories (Henderson & Berla, 1994): (1) studies on programs and interventions for family; and (2) studies on family processes. The first category presents studies on how to assess the effects of programs and other interventions for families with students. In other words, this study is concerned with how to help schools work more closely with families and support families in providing wider opportunities for young people. The second category presents studies on the way that families behave and interact with their children, including the relationship between parent involvement and student achievement from the family perspective, characteristics of families as learning environments and their effects on student performance.

Despite the long concerns about how to overcome the learning gap between students from rich family and those from poor family, this gap has been widened and intensified and it is getting more and more difficult for students from poor family to get over the difference. Researchers’ focus has been still on the relationship between family background and student achievement rather than on what specific factors constitute family background itself. To alleviate this trend and provide equal opportunity for low SES students, we need to pay sufficient attention to what constructs family background and how to measure it.

According to Nonoyama-Tarumi (2007), six items are considered in constructing various family background (or SES) composite indices: (1) Parental education, (2) Parental occupation, (3) Home educational resources, (4) Home possession related to classical culture, (5) Books at home, and (6) Wealth. Home possession related to classical culture refers to the presence of cultural possessions, such as classical literature and works of art at home. What is meant by wealth is among many researchers is family possessions, structural characteristics of the home, and lifetime earnings and purchasing power as well as the economic environment in which the child was raised. Out of six items, a total of 3 items, such as home educational resources, home possession related classical culture, and books at home, could be virtually supported for low SES students by using educational technology. It might not be perfectly substituted for actual resources but could be supplemented to some degree and hopefully could contribute to reducing the inequality of educational opportunity for low status students.  

What is the games' role? The core of effective, Inquiry-based, technology involved emerging type of curricula

There are reports about teenagers being addicted to computer games and losing interests in their study. There are also stories on that students confound themselves between the virtual and the real life, behaving anxious, violent as well as empty inside. When tradition lecture-based curriculum fails to drag these poor kids back to their orbit, and when the good or bad intermingled video games thrive, a cutting-edge STEM subjects related games tend to play a bigger role in the modern classroom.

As the article said, and I paraphrased, that the game-based curricula are narratively driven, experientially immersive and multi-media rich. The information communication technologies aid both in fostering students' inquiry and in providing richly situated learning experience (Dede, 2000), through which children can learn and collaboratively experience all stages of scientific inquiry.

The author of this paper analyzed and summarized six research articles related to video games benefiting the class teaching from JSET journey. And I found all the six articles are concentrated either environmental or health problems, especially focusing on water pollution and disease controlling. The two topics are really big issues worldwide. I really appreciate the present games, however, I am wondering if there should be more video games are for science design or virtual lab doing chemistry reactions. Planning and implementing this, the cooperation of science educators, expect programmers as well as the local schools is expected.