timeframe:

2 months - 2008 CHI Student Design Competition - Finalist

team members:

Eugene Chang, Hillary Elmore, Jun Youp Kim, Alex Zhu

design methods:

Persona Creation, Field Observation, Particpatory Design, Low- and Mid-Fidelity Prototyping, Usability Testing, Think-aloud Protocol

full report:

PDF (456 KB)

The CHI Student Design Competition asked to assist the state of living without a home. Our team focused on children, particularly students. These children tend to move schools often, causing a disruption of their education. Our project assists the transfer process.

Our research for this project began with understanding the scope of the problem. The McKinney-Vento Homeless Assistant Act ensures, in part, that schools properly care for homeless students. However, our research with social workers showed us that the problem was logistical in nature: registration documents were physically transferred from school to school. Our goal for this project was to provide an electronic stop-gap to facilitate the transferring of students.

There were two main user groups for this project. The first was school social workers. The social workers were in charge of keeping track of these students as well as aid in the enrollment and proper placement of these children. A major concern with these social workers, however, was that they were already had full schedules. Thus, any device we create must not intefere with their current roles.

The second group was parents of homeless children. These parents often did not have the required documents necessary for enrollment. Many are also wary of any goverment organizations, including schools. Thus, they were not prepared for the constant moving of schools.

These constraints lead us to a solution using a credit-card sized USB device which would hold the information and documents pertinent to enrolling a child into a school. This included basic biographical information as well as copies of the birth certificate. As the information is sensitive, the device is secure. To meet the needs of the parents, the device is small and can be carried with the chidren's medicaid cards, something we know the parents take with them anyway. The device also makes the social worker's jobs easier by providing electronic copies of information for them to copy and paste.a

A major hurdle with this project was the lack of access to the second population. Human Subjects Committee rules coupled with time constraints prevented our team from accessing the target population directly. Thus, we used interviews with social workers and literature about the habits of this population to come up with our solution.

A second challenge for this project was the shift from a 2 week project format to a 2 month project format. The same kinds of logistics that worked for the three previous projects had to be modified. Proportionally more time was necessary planning this project than in previous ones to make sure we were using time effectively throughout the timeline.