Pop Up
Delivering autonomous learning for children in emergency settings
What makes this project unique
We used creative methods to include the perspectives and experiences of children so we could understand and design beyond what they could, or couldn’t, say.
Partners
Airbel Impact Lab (Airbel) at the International Rescue Committee (IRC)
Imagine Worldwide
Enuma
Location
Bangladesh
Focus
Education
Pop-Up was piloting in Bangladesh, with the goal of bringing tablet-based, locally-tailored autonomous learning to bridge the educational gap for Rohingya refugee children.
Our mission? To immerse ourselves into the program and gather insights from different folks involved to not just evaluate but cook up ideas to make this program have more impact.
Approach
We got busy! We had in-depth interviews, watched how the learning sessions went down, and gathered everyone for some good ol' focus group discussions.
We sat in the learning sessions, curious about how kids used and learned from the software. We talked to facilitators, who shared how they supported the kids, what they found challenging, and what impact they witnessed. We chatted with parents to see if this program was right on target with their hopes for their kids. We also got a perspective from the implementation team on how they made the tech work, even in a low-resource setting.
The local team joined us in the research, and we gave them training on how to ask the right questions and turn observations into insights.
We watched hours of Pop-Up sessions to understand how kids interact and learn through the software
Output
The way that kids, facilitators, parents, and implementers were using, experiencing, and participating in the program gave us meaningful ideas to turn into recommendations.
Our UX/UI research taught us so much around how children actually learn. We used this to give the software developers some practical pointers for their software to better match how children think and behave.
All these recommendations got carried over into the next phase of rigorous evaluation, where it will reach more children in Bangladesh. Exciting!
We observed how facilitators supported the children and kept them focused
We got creative and used a play model of the learning space to help children speak their minds