Design Sprints for Kids: Unlocking the next generation’s creativity

This is a story about my wonderful 7 year old daughter and how she used a GV style design sprint to achieve her Brownies Inventor badge.

My daughter Matilda was tasked with completing a Brownie interest badge over her school holidays. With dozens of topics to choose from, I was thrilled when she decided to pursue the Inventor badge — the only problem was, she didn’t know what to invent.

However, with a little guidance, I knew she could solve her problem.

Enter the design sprint…

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Who was on the sprint team?

We kept the sprint team light…

• Facilitator — Me; an NN/g & HFI certified UX Director.
• Designer — Matilda; a 7 year old Brownie.
• Test participant — Jack; Matilda’s 18 month old baby brother who was oblivious to the whole thing.

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What question did you want to answer in your sprint?

Inventors are usually pictured as people with pens, pencils, rulers and set-squares. So its no surprise that if you ask a 7 year old to invent something, their first action is likely to grab a pen and start drawing.

However, without stimulus or prompts, they will very quickly ask “what shall I invent?” — and this is what happened with Matilda. She wanted to invent something, but didn’t know where to start.

This immediately got me thinking about the design sprint.

1. Firstly, I knew we could use the Empathy and Define stages of Design Thinking to create a springboard for an area to investigate.
2. Secondly, as Matilda was eager to start designing and making, I needed to maintain her interest, not impose too much theory, and get to the fun ideation stage as quickly as possible.

The approach I took was to explain…

There are some steps we can take to help us come up with ideas for inventions.

Rather than explain the whole design sprint process, I simply told Matilda there were 5 steps and I’d explain each one as we worked through them.

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1. Starting with empathy

We started with a single piece of A4 paper.

The reason for this is that a single piece of paper provides focus and scope. Focus on the stage at hand, and scope in the sense that only one-piece-of-paper’s worth of effort was required.

I asked Matilda to take a coloured pen and write the word ‘empathise’ at the top in large letters.

The first lesson was how to spell ‘empathise’ while the second was to understand what it meant.

Empathy is when we can understand what it might be like for other people. If we empathise with someone it means we understand how they think and feel about something.

There are lots of debates about how to define empathy, but for a 7 year old, the above definition worked just fine.

So I asked Matilda if there’s anything that came to mind and her immediate response related to her 18 month old baby brother who she absolutely adores.

Matilda wanted to know what it felt like for my wife and I to look after her baby brother Jack.

“That’s perfect” I said, “write it down!”

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If we empathise with a 7 year old, we can understand that introducing the concept of a design process is enough to take on, never mind new words, spellings and meanings. So rather than introduce the empathy mapping technique, I simply asked Matilda to think about how my wife and I might think and feel about looking after Jack.

I asked her to write down some of the words that came to mind, just as we would do on an empathy map.

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While in the empathy phase, I wanted to impart some knowledge about the importance of research. If we were going to design properly, we needed some empirical data.

I asked Matilda to think about the words she wrote down and to think about what she sees my wife and I do. Recalling this observational data, I asked her to write down why she selected those words.

It turns out we’re tired and exhausted because we run around the house chasing our little boy to make sure he doesn’t hurt himself… sounds about right!

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The final thing I suggested Matilda do was to conduct a brief interview with the people she was designing for.

As well as watching people, its also really helpful to talk to people about how they think and feel.

This was as simple as having Matilda ask my wife what she thinks about Jack running off around the house. My wife’s response being: “I worry when I don’t know where Jack is.”

And there it was — the start of a problem statement…

2. Defining the problem

Being mindful that Matilda hadn’t drawn or invented anything yet, but had written a whole side of A4, I wanted to keep the next step as light as possible.

As before, Matilda took a single piece of paper and wrote the heading at the top. Again, we learnt the spelling and meaning before starting the activity.

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I always find the problem definition stage tough, but Matilda had this great insight that my wife and I were tired from running around after Jack and were also worried when he ran out of the room.

I briefly explained how flipping the problem into a question can help us come up with ideas.

This step required a leap of faith on Matilda’s part and some conversation to craft the HMW statement. Its this phase where I helped the most with content, but they were all Matilda’s own thoughts and words.

On reflection, I think a goal > context > benefit model would have helped me communicate. A learning point for next time.

However, Matilda arrived at her springboard question…

How might we know where Jack is when he runs around the house so that we don’t have to worry?

3. Coming up with ideas

Again, we started with a new piece of paper and wrote the word “ideas” at the top.

As she entered the ideation stage of the design sprint, Matilda now knew what she wanted to invent.

She wanted to invent something that would let us know where Jack was in the house so that we didn’t have to worry about him.

As before, I didn’t want to introduce too many methods so avoided ideation techniques. I didn’t want to put any time pressure on Matilda either, so I avoided Crazy8s and similar activities, but instead suggested she come up with 6 different ideas, one per post-it.

Here’s what she came up with…

1. Stop Jack from running off in the first place with an Alexa enabled door. We could tell Alexa to close the door out of the room as Jack headed towards it. (We’ve recently introduced Amazon Echos and Hive lighting into the house, so voice activated things are front of mind which is where I guess this came from)
2. If Jack was free to leave the room, we could have a camera in every room which would be connected to our phones so we could see where he was.
3. Developing the idea above, Matilda suggested that rather than having a camera in every room, we could put a camera on Jack — using our phones.
4. Similar to attaching a phone to Jack, Matilda thought about putting bells on his shoes. That way he’d make a noise when he walked and we’d know where he was.
5. Trying to build on the previous idea I said; “that’s interesting, what else could you do with noise?” to which Matilda had the idea of putting bells on a hat rather than shoes.
6. Trying to push further, I asked; “what if it wasn’t Jack that made the noise? Could you use noise in another way to know where Jack was?” to which Matilda suggested triggers on each door which would play a different sound so we’d know which room he’d entered.

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Once the post-it notes were created, we talked through them in detail.

We avoided any critiquing and instead talked about all the fun elements of the ideas, the bits we liked, and how they might work.

I explained to Matilda that when you work in a group, people will like different ideas.

One of the things you can do to choose which idea to make, is to have everyone in the group vote for the idea they think is best. This means everyone gets a fair say.

Matilda and I took a silent vote and both selected the idea where we attach a camera to Jack so we could see where he was.

4. Making a prototype

Matilda took another piece of paper, learnt how to spell ‘prototype’, and talked about what it meant before starting the activity.

We started by talking about the critical elements of the prototype and arrived at the following components.

• The phone that would be strapped to Jack
• A separate phone that we would watch from
• A safe and secure method for attaching the phone to Jack, so he could move freely around the house.

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We had the phones, but Matilda needed to explore ideas for the method by which the phone would be attached to Jack — this was critical for the prototype to be testable.

1. String — Matilda’s first idea was to make a string harness that would go over Jack’s shoulders, around his waist and also around the phone. But this was rejected on the basis of safety and the fact that no one could pin the 18 month old down long enough to be able to strap him up!
2. Tape — Matilda’s next idea was to use masking tape. She thought this would be a faster method to get the phone onto Jack, by sticking the phone directly to his T-shirt. But an early attempt proved this wasn’t feasible.
3. A pouch — Matilda looked back at her ideas board and returned to her original drawing which had a pouch or case that the phone could sit in.

It was at this point I intervened…

A prototype is just a way to test an idea, so it doesn’t have to be perfect or look like the final thing. And you don’t have to build everything from scratch either — its ok to take shortcuts.

This led onto the final idea where Matilda would make a pouch to hold the phone, but use an existing method to attach it to Jack.

We talked about how some sort of belt would be helpful and Matilda immediately thought of Jack’s backpack.

A cardboard box, some tape, and a little help with scissors saw Matilda arrive at the prototype.

This method also led to a happier little boy who now didn’t notice what was going on as he concentrated on cooking LEGO in the toy kitchen!

5. Testing the prototype

The moment of truth.

As before. We started with a new piece of paper and wrote the word “test” at the top with space to write the results.

My wife’s phone was put in the holder Matilda made, and it was threaded onto the backpack’s belt. We initiated FaceTime and then put the backpack on Jack.

In the end we opted for the receiver to be an iPad so that we had a larger view as well as allowing me to take photos on my phone.

Everything was ready, and off Jack went!!

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Although I enjoyed every minute I spent with Matilda in the 1 hour Design Sprint, this was by far the most rewarding stage.

I got to see my little girl in fits of laughter, with huge proud smiles of achievement on her face and giggling as she herself ran around the house with the iPad shrieking…

“Jack’s in the playroom, playing with the kitchen!”…

“Now he’s got his lightsaber!”… “Daddy, Jack’s got the lightsaber!”

“Now he’s spotted a bird outside!”… “I can hear him saying hello birdie!”

“Mummy, mummy, don’t worry, Jack’s in the playroom. He’s near the chalkboard now!”

In my eyes, thats a massive win!

Things that worked well

For a first run at a design sprint for kids, most of the approach and methods seemed to work well.

In particular…

• The use of single sheet of A4 paper helped to constrain effort and time as well as setup the activity. I also felt that if Matilda got bored or didn’t like a stage, she knew it would only be 10 minutes of work before we moved on.
• Tackling the project in one go as a loose one hour design sprint worked well and front loading the first 15 minutes with writing to make way for drawing and making was the correct thing to do too.
• During the ideation stage, the little prompts I gave seemed to encourage and help rather than give answers, so the activity definitely needs facilitating.

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Things I’d change

There’d be a few things I’d change next time.

1. I’d like to see less writing and more kinaesthetic learning in the empathy phase. Eagerness to capture my daughter’s attention and dive straight into the sprint meant I failed to think about how we could build out proper observational and interview activities for that first phase.
2. I had to intervene a few times during the ideation phase to help Matilda develop her ideas. Similar to the empathy phase, I think there’s some light touch methods that could be used here. I’d remove the time pressure but perhaps think about random input, stimulus or storyboarding. It might have been nice to have Matilda generate a name for each of her ideas too.
3. I think the Define stage needs some thought as it very much centred around a conversation. What I needed was a simple technique to get us to the problem statement; something around goal-context-benefit perhaps.

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Call to action

If there’s a call to action to this post then it’s this…

Please, please, please try running a design sprint with your children. Run them with your young nephews and nieces, with the classes you teach, in the after school clubs you support. Try using design sprints for homework, school competitions and more.

I genuinely believe design thinking can unlock our children’s imagination and prepare them for their future world which will demand critical thinking, collaboration and creativity.

And please let me know how you get on! (Contact details below)

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Final note

If you decide to post or re-share this please credit my wonderful Matilda and her very patient little brother Jack — for all their hard work!

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