The Learning Lenses

This project focused on finding the positive aspects of the COVID-19 pandemic and creating a product, system, or service that would sustain and improve the quality of life for individuals, families, or communities. My team and I used the design thinking process, which combines human desirability with technological feasibility and economic viability. We worked through the five stages of design thinking: researching user needs, identifying problems, challenging assumptions, brainstorming ideas, prototyping solutions, and testing them.

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Through our research, we noticed an increase in McBurney students after the pandemic and decided to focus on how online schooling affected UW students' learning styles. Specifically, we aimed to help incoming freshmen succeed in the post-pandemic college environment, where attention spans had shortened. We developed a mandatory education course to help students explore learning styles and navigate their coursework. Our product, Learning Lenses, analyzes how students' brains and eye movements respond to different teaching styles, providing feedback to professors to improve student-teacher relationships and enhance learning outcomes. This project took a little over a month and I enjoyed it because it was our first project in this class and it served as my first experience with design thinking and having to implement what we had been learning into a real idea.