learning Experiences and Materials
Designing Courses, Workshops and Self Guides at Tangled Joy (2020-2021)
Staff at Tangled Joy, facilitate collaboration and teach problem solving through online workshops. Our audiences are conference attendees, staff and employees within and cross organizations, senior communities, small businesses and K-12 students.
As a Designer at Tangled Joy, I prepare the workshop contents and organized the learning materials and tools. I also designed four products for the Tangled Joy Store: Endurance, Forgiveness, Compassion and Gratitude. These products show a path to communicate with self and others using Design tools such as journey mapping and brainstorming.
Designed and Facilitated More than 50 Trainings and Trained 400 Employees (2018-2020)
I loved teaching and designing courses for employees across the public sector while working at the Innovation Lab at the Office of Personnel Management. I designed many remote and in person workshops and co-facilitated them with my peers. The workshops varied in length from two hours to six months. The content were around Basic Design and problem solving skills to advanced ones such as visual communication.
One of The tools I designed for a customized workshop
One of the workshops that I co-designed with a peer was customized for stakeholders in the disability sector. Every month, about 40 stakeholders from public, private and non-profit sector would gather to discover and learn from each other. We created design tools and content to facilitate the communication and activities. At the end of the workshop, the participants developed a shared understanding about important issues in the work they were doing for and with people with disability. Together they mapped the current eco-system of disability. Below are some images from the work.
Design Customized Courses, a Book for After-school k-12 Educators (2017-2018)
While research [1] shows that after-school programs “have the potential to impact a range of positive learning and development outcomes,” some programs may not have the resources to design effective and engaging courses for after-school. Therefore for addressing this great need, I wrote a book , Design Customized Courses, to help educators and after-school staff design more effective activities and classes.
My book starts with exploring initial objectives which vary based on the topic, learners and geographic location. Then it offers tips on research and organizing the collected information to serve and influence the objectives. The book narrative continues with introducing ways of evaluation since early evaluation and iteration are important.
Design Customized Courses walks the reader to create an overall narrative for the course with cultural and community considerations to motivate the learner. It also shares how to design day to day activities. Additionally, it provides tools to manage time and evaluate the overall design for improvement.
I wrote and designed the book over the course of one year at The Learning Community, a charter school in Providence, RI. The PDF of the book is available for free on request.
Created an Entrepreneurship Course for After-school Educators and Staff (2017-2018)
Research shows that early entrepreneurship training can have major life-long benefits including self-sufficiency, resiliency and creative problem solving*. However, many students don’t experience entrepreneurship until later in life if they ever do. In order to fill this gap, I developed an entrepreneurship course, Taste of Culture, over the course of two years while working for two K-12 schools and pilot tested them at the Learning Community Charter School in RI and Mother Caroline Academy in MA.
The learning objectives for the course were connecting students to their community, engaging families, using math and science in practical projects, spurring excitement of learning by discovering students interest & creating a fun and game-like environment and teaching entrepreneurship Skills including Design Thinking and Process, Presenting Ideas, Backward design.
When possible, I used visual communication to facilitate the learning. For instance, in the table of content, I used colors to show the course content. As the below picture displays, day one include orange, green, light and dark blue. For this day, Physical activity which is the light blue is 15 minutes. Other colors refer to writing, hands on experience, watching video/presentation and discussing.
The following video shows how students are using the course material and discussing the price evaluation.
* Why Entrepreneurship Should Be Taught Starting in Junior High School, Shawn Osborne, President and CEO, Network for Teaching Entrepreneurship
Embracive Design 