Introduction
On November 24th 2018, UTM made an industry visit to OneMaker Medini for Software Engineering students. According to OneMaker’s official website, OneMaker Group Pte Ltd is a leading Maker-centric service provider in the region who have been advocating and supporting the nascent Maker movement in Singapore since their establishment in 2014. Their core business revolves around Maker education, digital prototyping services and corporate professional development. Their experience in building, supporting and operating Makerspaces for both educational and corporate institutions allow them to better understand their clients' needs and to serve them well accordingly.
Details of Journey
The industrial visit to OneMaker Medini was held on November 24th from 8am until 8pm. Software Engineering students were gathered at CICT UTM before leaving for the visit. Our first destination on the visits was to Forest City Johor Bahru and spent 20 minutes to look around and gather some information. After that, we headed to OneMaker Medini. It was located at lot Office 2, Upper Ground Floor, Mall of Medini, Johor Bahru. There were three workshop at the event. The first one talking about Technological Disruption, the second about Robot Making, and the third about Design Making which will be detailed in the report.
Details of Design Thinking Process & Desciption
Design Thinking is a design methodology that provides a solution-based approach to solving problems. It’s useful in solving complex problems that are ill-defined or unknown. There are five stages according to d.school, are as follows:
- Empathise
The first stage of the Design Thinking process is to gain an empathic understanding of the problem you are trying to solve. This involves consulting experts to find out more about the area of concern through observing, engaging and empathizing with people to understand their experiences and motivations, as well as immersing yourself in the physical environment so you can gain a deeper personal understanding of the issues involved.
One of the main feature of schools nowadays is the classroom, it can affect the students’ and the teacher’s performance in learning. It’s also where the students spend the whole day. Unfortunately, a huge effort is needed to create a classroom that support student to study and teacher to teach effectively. Classroom condition will affect teachers and students performance at school. So, we have to find an easier way to improve students and teachers performance and to improve education at many countries that still have a tons of problems.
- Define (the Problem)
During the Define stage, you put together the information you have created and gathered during the Empathise stage. This is where you will analyse your observations and synthesise them in order to define the core problems that you and your team have identified up to this point.
To create a perfect classroom, there are some things that need to be done. For example, maintenance. Schools may need to hire some people to clean up the classroom everyday. They also need to buy new things like chairs and tables every couple of years.
Punctuality is also a problem for schools nowadays. There are plenty of students coming to the class late, with various of reasons, like traffic jams, road accidents, bad weather, etc. Students may be stuck on their way to school and it’s both time and money consuming.While attending workshop 3 at OneMaker Medini, we were asked to create an idea of what the future classroom is like.
- Ideate
During the third stage of the Design Thinking process, designers are ready to start generating ideas. You’ve grown to understand your users and their needs in the Empathise stage, and you’ve analysed and synthesised your observations in the Define stage, and ended up with a human-centered problem statement.
For solving these problem, we proposed an idea of classroom that doesn’t physically exist. We may have to implement some futuristic inventions like Virtual Reality, Augmented Reality, Hologram, etc. Unfortunately, there are some reasons why these invention can’t be used, yet. For example, we haven’t found a way to actually use a hologram. It can’t be displayed unless it’s projected to something, like mist. Another thing is, to use these invention, a large amount of money may be required.
4 . Prototype
The design team will now produce a number of inexpensive, scaled down versions of the product or specific features found within the product, so they can investigate the problem solutions generated in the previous stage.
The prototype that we choose to solve this problem is Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality classroom. Basically this prototype use Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality that is already exist right now, but we improve it by combine both of it together. This classroom use Virtual Reality ,so, students and teachers just stay at their own home and turn on their devices and make connection to be connected to the school server. We use Virtual Reality for students and teachers to be in a real time situation, basically it is like a normal classes but in Virtual Reality.
We use Augmented Reality to display the 3D for each students and teachers. By combine both Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality, the classroom will be represented by Augmented Reality and the real time teaching and learning will be represented by Virtual Reality. To make this happen we need a strong internet connection, we hope in the future internet connection will be much more faster than now. Schools need to have a server of their own to make this happen also. This project should exist in near future.
- Test
Designers or evaluators rigorously test the complete product using the best solutions identified during the prototyping phase. This is the final stage of the 5 stage-model, but in an iterative process, the results generated during the testing phase are often used to redefine one or more problems and inform the understanding of the users, the conditions of use, how people think, behave, and feel, and to empathise.
Unfortunately, we haven’t been able to implement our idea into reality, because the lack of information and budget. So far, we can only make theories, define the problems we might encounter, and try to solve them without actually testing the prototype.
*Author/Copyright holder: Teo Yu Siang and Interaction Design Foundation. Copyright licence: CC BY-NC-SA 3.0
Reflection
Our goal in SCSJ is not just to learn the theory and principle of computer science and engineering but also to apply it in real life matters. We need to have the skills to identify, formulate, and solve real world problems through software engineering principles and methodologies.
Design thinking impact us on that matter, while doing the design thinking process, we learn how to solve real life matters like we mention previously, and not just that in the process we learn how to work effectively as a team, to think critically while working towards a common goal for example this time we learned it by asked to create a perfect classroom in the future, from this topic we have to generate a lot of ideas to solve this problem, therefore it improves us on that manner.
The improvement necessary for us to improve our potential is to be more involved in project like this, trying new things, because people learn more effectively while doing it not just learning it, so to compete in this competitive and globalized world, we need to seek more experience to make us ready and adaptable in this industry for the future