Design Assumptions by ‘Adult’ Designers versus ‘Child’ User Behaviour

Abstract

Instructional theories postulate that learning is most effective when the learning environment is friendly, non-threatening and attractive to the child. However, designing fun-based interactivity to deliver serious educational content is quite a challenge. Sudiksha has designed and developed a series of multilingual CD-ROMs in collaboration with not-for-profit organizations. The objectives of these are to make learning fun in government schools in India. The titles are custom designed to suit the school curricula; the courses are socio-culturally relevant to an Indian audience.

The crux of designing courses for schools is that we are ‘adults’ designing content for children. Our panel of design advisers usually consists of pedagogy experts, psychologists and teachers. But the child-user is as dynamic as the medium and more. The user who learns on the run makes our solutions obsolete at a rapid pace. We often take pulse checks to figure out if we are on track with our solutions and our findings are often surprising. The findings of one such study are elaborated here.