Empowering young students to take action against climate change
Duration
3 weeks
Project Type
Tablet, design challenge
Tools
Figma, Notion
Role
Lead UX/UI Designer
At just 15 years old, an impassioned student named Greta Thunberg stood in protest alone in front of a parliament building demanding climate action. Since then, over 2 million students from all over the globe have joined her.
So when we were challenged to shift human behavior to tackle issues of climate change as part of the 4-week Design for Change UX Design Challenge, we were inspired by Greta Thunberg to start small.
DESIGN CHALLENGE
How might we create social transformation that shifts users towards greener behavior & sustainable practices?
THE SOLUTION
A mobile app that empowers students to take action against climate change
Steward is a mobile application for young students in grades 3-6 that teaches climate change with kid-friendly resources, encourages action by visualizing their real-world impact, & fosters a community of changemakers.
🛣 Process Overview
🗂 Organization
Being the Notion junkie I am, I created a team page on Notion that included:
A schedule
Kept track of competition deadlines, workshop dates, & our project timeline
Important documents & quick links
Provided easy access to the challenge brief, judging rubrics, & resources provided by the challenge organizers
Meeting notes
Documenting our ideas, research, & thoughts throughout the entire process
Screenshot of our team page on Notion.
🤔 Research
As a group, we identified how our early education played a key role in our habits today. But we asked ourselves — Was that enough? How have student attitudes changed given recent climate events? What is the reality of climate change education in Canadian schools?
We narrowed our scope to climate change education within elementary schools.
THE OPPORTUNITY
The UN has identified that young people are critical agents of change to build a more sustainable future.
KEY STAKEHOLDERS & RESEARCH GOALS
Who are key stakeholders & what do we want to know about them?
SECONDARY RESEARCH
Other key research findings
A lack of provincial & school-board resources
Climate change education is often left to the competence, dedication, & enthusiasm of individual teachers.
A non-comprehensive teaching approach
Schools often focus on climate change within the science curriculum (e.g. learning about impacts on ecosystems), but neglect to explore broader economic, political, & social impacts.
👂 Empathizing through user interviews
I spoke to real students & teachers to see whether their experiences strengthened or challenged my findings. Given the young age group of the students we’re targeting & a lack of access to elementary school teachers, we opted for user interviews.
USER INTERVIEW RESULTS
Student pain points
Q1. How do you feel about climate change?
“I don’t like to learn about it. It makes me feel nervous”
“We only learn about the bad things”
“I don’t understand when my parents tell me about it”
“the TV scares me sometimes”
Q2. What & how do you learn about sustainability in school?
“…videos & readings but they’re so boring”
“I don’t remember what it said in the video”
“On garbage pick-up day, my class was the best, we had 3 huge bags of garbage!”
Q3.Do you know how their actions impact the environment?
“I do it because my parents/teachers tell me to”
“my teacher said it’s good for animals
JOURNEY MAP
What is a student’s journey as they learn about climate change?
I created a journey map that mapped the research from above onto the step-by-step journey students experience as they learn about climate change. This helped me visualize their pain points & identify areas of opportunity.
KEY INSIGHTS
For students
😰 Eco-anxiety
Media surrounding climate change & a greater focus on the bad in classrooms result in children feeling scared, nervous, & dismissive about their future.
🥱 Boring teaching methods
When climate change is taught in the classroom, it is primarily taught within science classes in ways that aren't engaging for students.
USER INTERVIEWS
Teacher pain points
“When I try to teach these topics in my class, I do notice that some students get a little shaken & scared.
In my classroom, I try to use visual tools so it’s more engaging for children. But it’s hard because I teach younger students so I get even less support from the school board than older grades. I often have to create my own lesson plans if I want to teach them.”
— Ashley L, Grade 4 Teacher
For educators
📕 Resource & curriculum constraints
Curriculums are already jam-packed with other topics. Without access to adequate resources & support from school boards, teachers lack the time &/or knowledge to incorporate climate change topics into their lessons
😥 Teachers feel unequipped
In addition to a lack of resources, the breadth & controversy of content related to climate change leaves teachers feeling hesitant to teach it
REVISED DESIGN CHALLENGE
How might we educate, empower & encourage students to take action, big or small, on issues of climate change?
💡Ideation
After defining the problems to tackle, we drew on our interviews, secondary research, empathy map, & journey map to identify ways we can solve them.
SOLVING THE PROBLEM
So what sparked hope & shifts in behavior within young students?
IDEA DEVELOPMENT
Using our findings from above, we had several brainstorming sessions exploring potential features for our solution that addressed key problem areas. Our goal was to take a comprehensive approach to empower young students by utilizing:
01. Education 📚
02. Gamification 🎮
03. Community-building 🤗
SKETCHING
We began to sketch out different ways these features could look, interact with each other, & be used by students.
How users track habits & how it's rewarded on the class community
The learning experience on the app
A student's profile dashboard displaying their class' total impact and items unlocked
💼 Business Considerations
Being a team of business students, we considered the business perspective of our
solution & its features.
Cuts to funding results in high barriers to entry
With the Ontario government confirming huge cuts to education budgets, the primary customer segment has very low buying power. To combat this risk, I intend to build our user base by targeting other segments like teachers and parents first.
Key partnerships with children’s education & non-profit organizations
Partnerships with like-minded children’s education organizations like Jumpstart and the UN’s Act Now committee would not only provide higher quality materials to users but be a more time & cost-efficient strategy for the education feature.
OUR SOLUTION
Virtual class environment
Students can earn points by learning about climate change & logging sustainable habits that go towards a class total — working together to unlock items that help their class environment flourish.
Habit tracker
After logging their sustainable habits, they receive points for their actions & more importantly see the direct real-world impact of their actions.
Educational resources
Resource database that addresses teachers’ need for a more structured curriculum & resources to teach about climate change.
Community
Newsfeed of posts by educators about their classroom’s climate action. Connecting young changemakers across the world to inspire activism.
TESTING
This feature was created after a round of testing when a student asked “What if my friends aren’t in my class?”
THE OUTCOME
Winning 1st place & the Audience’s Choice award
Out of 52 teams, Steward was awarded first, winning $5200, split amongst our team! Our project was praised by the judges for being “fun, thoughtful, & well-formulated”, & including “robust research” & an “effective presentation”.
Check out our pitch submission here!
🧪 Testing & Iterating
After the competition, I chose to revisit the project to make some improvements.
ITERATION 1
Designing a more effective education page
I received feedback from teachers that the education page would be overwhelming for students. I redesigned the topic and lesson cards, and the layout of the education page.
Revised education dashboard.
Revised topic cards.
Revised lesson cards.
🔑 Key Takeaways
01. Planning & organization go a long way
During this competition, members of the team were having extremely busy school/work weeks. Having a notion page that showed our timeline, everyone’s tasks & handy resources was an effective way to keep all of us on schedule.
02. Building a design system early on
Creating a design system by creating components for buttons, navbar, & cards, as well as defining font, color, & drop shadow styles on Figma before we began our high-fidelity prototype was a huge time-saver & made it easier for the team to maintain consistency throughout our work.
03. The power of storytelling
It was important in our pitch that we showcased our entire design process in a way that was engaging through our slides, script, & verbal expression, taking the judges on a journey from the problem to our solution. According to feedback from the judges, this is something that differentiated us from other submissions.
↗️ What I’d do differently
01. Evaluate technical feasibility
By talking to developers & software engineers, we could identify the potential technical challenges & opportunities that come with our design.
02. Identify metrics of success
While there are metrics within the app that can measure a class's environmental impact, there are many other goals to measure such as a child’s comprehension of the environment, feelings about climate change after using the app, & sustainable habits maintained.
03. Outlining all assumptions earlier on
I decided on a tablet solution based on the assumption that most kids have a tablet at their disposal. However, I would opt for a web platform now instead to ensure the solution was accessible to all students regardless of geographic area or socio-economic status. Outlining all my assumptions earlier on could have not only helped me avoid personal bias but also drive user research goals.
