Background Info
Rose-Hulman requires most students to complete a technical communications course. The course is designed to provide us with the skills and experience necessary to be great professional communicators. While taking this course, I worked on a team with 3 other students to design and deliver a product requested by a client.
Project Overview
Our client was Bricks-4-Kids, a Lego brick building activity center where children can learn about engineering, science, and architecture by playing with Legos.
Our client, Bricks-4-Kidz, wanted us to improve an existing solar panel Lego build, by making it more engaging and interesting for children. Our task was to come up with a new design from scratch, and produce all the required support documentation that the client would need to use for the build, such as: instruction sets, teacher guides & PowerPoints, and a daily what-I-built summary page for the parents.
Existing Design
Updated Design
Skills Gained
This venture provided me with the communication skill of being aware of who the person I'm communicating with is. With this awareness, I can then be sure to tailor my communication to provide only the details someone would care about.
This skill was exhausted when my team created a set of instructions for our Lego build, and tailored it to an 8-10 year old age group. One specific example of our tailored design was in the choice to hold the use of colors, shapes, and orientations as the most important features/considerations when designing our instructions set. We made this decision after a period of user research. Through site visits and interviews, we discovered that children would begin building immediately after they saw colors, shapes, and orientations on the page, before ever reading any of the text or numbers. User-awareness skills like this were applied to every document in the project, and helped us learn the effectiveness of taking the time to learn about our audience.
Instruction Set
Teacher's Guide
Parent's Summary Page
Lessons Learned
I believe this project was a success because of great teamwork. Because communication was the underlying focus of the course, I think everyone on the team may have put extra effort into making sure to communicate regularly on deliverables, meeting times, and current work\progress. This made it much easier to build off of other's work, which resulted in a good final product. Our client even mentioned that she would most likely even use our build design when traveling to local elementary schools.
Downloads
Click the PDF icon to the right to download the supporting documentation.