Through Rachel Carson's Eyes
Textbooks are notoriously boring. But, how might we make them better, more engaging? This was the question that my two project partners and I contemplated after talking with a high school student who found Environmental Science homework uselessly boring.
The insight that we built off of was our user's feeling that everything she was learning was set in stone and that she just needed to memorize facts in order to pass the class. She wanted active engagement and all her textbook offered were words on a page.
So, we prototyped an app that would allow a student to learn about a topic by investigating, rather than reading. The topic we chose was DDT's effect on wildlife. Rachel Carson was an environmentalist who was instrumental in this movement, so we decided to give students the information she might have had, and have them come to their own conclusions.