During my Teach For India Fellowship, I spent a great deal of time with underprivileged students in the slums of Mumbai. These students had great potential but often lacked the opportunity and resources to help them cultivate the skills needed to succeed later in life. Two other Fellows and I, who had all participated in Model United Nations during school, teamed up to implement a similar program at TFI to give our students a platform to enhance their critical thinking skills, practice public speaking and develop a global perspective. Being the first of its kind in Mumbai, our program ranged from designing the curriculum to finding sponsorships and ultimately executing the Conference. Recently, we started exploring the idea of using technology to facilitate the process.
TFI MUN became a platform for students to grow beyond the class room.
The program started off 600 participants across Mumbai and Pune. Each class was given a handbook and lesson plans for 4 councils that could easily be implemented using class subject matter. The goal was to be able to provide this additional resource to students with minimal additional work for their teachers. The program ends with a yearly conference, where 2 members from each participating class are selected. The first year the conference consisted of 3 committees and 100 students. TFIMUN is now in its 3rd year, with over 300 students attending the conference.
We are also in the early stages of exploring and designing an student friendly App to ease the process for students and facilitators.
Through multiple iterations of the course and conversations with stakeholders 4 main pain points were identified :
Focusing on students accessibility to information, we surveyed 50 houses and found that 85% of the students have access to a mobile phone with internet. We began to explore different ways information could be accessible by them - the app being the most preferred.
Storyboard-----
Conference (2013)
• Orchestrated open forums with stakeholders about students’ aspirations and opportunities
• Conducted longitudinal surveys for Fellows to evaluate learning levels
• Explored global precedents to develop program framework
• Evaluated UN Councils, wrote the UNHCR study guide and guided Fellows through lesson plans
• Negotiated with institutions for sponsorships and collaborations
• Designed logo and marketing collateral for the program
• Organized teams, photographers and volunteers for the
Conference
App (2016)
• Executed interviews to identify users
• Created storyboards
• Designed early stage prototypes
• Explored accessible technology for students
As most know mindset is a huge problem when it comes to non traditional types of education. Limited resources or accessibility to to those resources is even a bigger problem. Designing for children also brings you back to the basics of how key simplicity is in user experience.
