Joyful Learning Stories
June – December 2025, for Dr. Brigid Baron, YouthLAB
Goal
To design and develop prototypes of a parent education intervention in order to support needfinding and feedback interviews. This project explores how we can support parents in fostering joyful learning moments with their children.
I created an interface to allow users to browse and listen to parent stories.
After hearing a story, users could then enter reflections on what they noticed.
Grouping stories by metadata helped us to get feedback from users on what interested them.
Process
I started by identifying themes in parent statements about learning from a previous dataset. I then used those themes along with prior need-finding work by the group to develop a prototype of a parent-to-parent learning tool.
Solution
I created a React web application with a database of parent learning stories in video format, each tagged with metadata such as learning topic and type of parent involvement.
A parent can browse the stories, choose one to listen to, and then respond to reflective prompts exploring what they noticed about the learning in the story.
A facilitator guide provides a framework to help parents learn how to identify opportunities to facilitate interest-driving learning at home.
Skills
education research
user testing
learning experience design
prototyping with AI coding tools (Lovable, Cursor, Supabase)
Outcome
From the pilot interview, we identified new insights into contexts for parent education interventions. These insights helped us to develop our interview protocol.
At the end of the quarter, I transferred ownership of the prototype to the research team for future interviews.