[staff] Program design through implementation and iteration
One of the ideas that's been on my mind recently is the importance of developing educational programs through a process of implementation and iteration. This is a somewhat intuitive concept, but has been raised for me recently as I engage in program and curriculum design in the Media Masters program, and as I watch as we begin training New York Public Library educators to implement our Playing 4 Keeps gaming program, the first online program at GK that we're scaling.
With Media Masters, an experimental pilot program that we're partnering with MIT's Project New Media Literacies to conduct, every piece of curriculum and the entire program design is brand new. In each project we engage in, we're taking guesses (educated, of course, but still guesses) as to whether something will work. Will students be interested in creating a wikipedia pages themselves? How long should a process like that take? How do we motivate participants to work collaboratively? And then we try it out, see what happens, circle back around and talk about how it worked. That implementation informs the way that we design and put into practice new projects that work off of similar principles.
I should also mention here that in this sort of incubation and development, and indeed in any youth program implementation, a critical part of the process is actually being in dialogue with the youth involved to see what they're actually interested in and what they'd like to see happen. (I wrote about this idea in my last post).
In Playing 4 Keeps, we incubated the program for three years, focusing on the core idea of having youth learn about serious issues and game design through the process of producing social issue oriented games. Each year, this core idea was implemented and then iterated upon, and we got to a place where we felt we knew enough about how this work can be conducted that we designed a model that could be replicated by others.
In the most basic sense, this process is the scientific method at work. Create a hypothesis, test it, refine it, test it again, refine more, and then see if it applies beyond a laboratory setting, in the wild, if you will. I'm excited to see that we're getting the opportunity to see how some of our work will play out beyond our organization, to see what the results of the years of implementation and iteration have wrought, and also seeing this as another opportunity to watch and refine the way we do our work.
