Starting a new year with monthly features: Uttarika & Monica

Every month, we will feature 1-3 awesome members of the lab! We’re kicking it off this Sep with Uttarika Shetty (MA candidate) and her project at the Cooney Center, and Monica Chan (EdD candidate) and her new doctoral fellowship at the National University of Singapore.

Meet Uttarika!

Hailing from Bangalore, India, Uttarika Shetty is a 2nd-year MA candidate at TC’s Instructional Technology & Media program, and spent her summer working with the Joan Ganz Cooney Center developing resources for designers in the industry and strategies to help the Center bridge the gap between research on kids and industry. 

The Cooney Center views designing with and for kids as the ultimate way to transform the digital media landscape into formal and informal spaces that support children of all backgrounds, including those who are struggling and those most marginalized. However, designing with and for kids is difficult because there is a disconnect between the kids who use digital products and the decision-makers who determine how digital experiences are created. As part of this initiative, the team at Cooney Center aims to develop fun and intuitive resources that help designers use research+business+design in their methodology.   

Uttarika’s summer project involved two main tasks. The first was to create a resource guide for designers in the industry. Based on several requests from designers, the team created a resource guide on designing characters as a technological or media tool to facilitate learning. She infused design principles with research and used several case studies to illustrate our point. She also interviewed employees at Sesame Street responsible for producing characters for the show (e.g., Julia, an autistic 4-year old Muppet, and Wes/Elijah, characters for the racial literacy initiative). This helped the team understand the process of developing characters for the show from start to finish. Uttarika focused on three design principles - how to design characters to enable parasocial relationships, how to scaffold activities in the form of a character's story that gives shape to specific learning goals, and the different roles that the character can play to facilitate learning and engagement. 

Uttarika then used this as an example for the second part of the project, which was to redesign resources/publications on the website and develop strategies to make these resources accessible, fun, and intuitive for designers, entrepreneurs, and managers. 

Overall, this was an invaluable opportunity for Uttarika to learn how Sesame Street produces and develops content that is not just fun but also educational!

Next, we have Monica!

Monica Chan is a 5th-year EdD candidate at TC’s Instructional Technology & Media program. Earlier this month, she was awarded the National University of Singapore Development Grant and a title of Young NUS Fellow for her interdisciplinary research in STEAM / Maker education and formative assessment, based in Singapore. Congrats, Monica!

The NUS Development Grant is part of NUS’ continuing efforts to nurture high-calibre Singaporean talents for a career in academia. For 2021-22, Monica will be attached to NUS’ Department of Communications and New Media with a faculty mentor, and explore the NUS academic ecosystem. For her dissertation, she designed a software tool for student-teacher collaboration during documentation of maker projects. She is now working with a couple of public primary schools and nonprofit K-12 makerspaces in Singapore to study students’ reflection and documentation, as well as teachers’ feedback processes during their maker projects.