services
Product architecture and configuration studies
Industrial design
Co-creation
Prototypes and appearance models
Results
Concept and prototype featured at Adobe’s SXSW EDU showcase
SCOPE
In 2013, No Right Brain Left Behind and Green Dot Public Schools launched an award-winning project to infuse creativity into education, starting with libraries. We teamed up to create a set of learning tools to grow our common vision: keep kids creative, and equip them with the skills needed to thrive in an increasingly tech-driven, collaborative and interconnected world. We call it the SMRTKT. It’s an educational toolkit that reimagines how students interact with technology through collaboration, play, and discovery.
Working alongside kids and teachers from diverse backgrounds – from South Los Angeles to Santa Monica — we gave students prototypes and preliminary concepts, incorporated their thoughts, and brought back refined versions for more feedback. Meanwhile, facilitating a series of cross-disciplinary workshops, including teachers and administrators, we began to understand the challenges of incorporating new technology in education.
We learned as much from the kids as the adults. Students engage in learning differently when problem-solving with limited time as a team: enthusiasm and creative thinking take the lead. However, time constraints, limitations, and regulations become a real impediment to new ways of learning. We discovered that tech barriers are not age-discriminatory. Room and resources to experiment in schools can be scarce commodities. We needed a solution that met the needs of everyone in the ecosystem – making the job of both the teacher and the student more intuitive, satisfying, and effective.
We created a collection of tools that redefine how students interact with computers by emphasizing movement, collaboration, and technological literacy. Each tool in the SMRTKT is a building block of the technology we encounter every day, in our smartphones and beyond. With technology out from behind the curtain, students gain a familiarity with what drives the world, and how to use it.
Meanwhile, the SMRTKT experience enables teams to solve problems, demonstrating curricula by taking it off the screen, off the page, and into the hands of young learners.
“Pull has been a great asset to NRBLB… The SMRTKT functional prototypes broke new ground for us and our stakeholders. Pull demonstrated a new method for co-creation and problem solving in the traditionally challenging landscape of public education; a method that we are still using today.”