Collaborate to reach a common ground

United Christian College is a Christian secondary school that focuses on whole-person education with the hopes of developing students’ faith, creativity, responsibility and compassion to lay foundations for their lifelong learning.

This year in collaboration with Quality Education Fund, UCC found more room to work with designers to co-create an experience of the yearly thanksgiving program. The challenge was to collaborate with teachers and the principal to reach out to secondary school students for feedback to apply to the design of an online-offline, gamified thanksgiving experience.

From Appreciation to Challenge, Co-creating a Safe Space to Reflect

With great efforts by the teachers and principal, together we pushed forward new ideas by transforming a journal into a complete handbook of the 30-day challenge of gratitude including an Instagram layout, understanding five senses and lyrical references, plus notes for self-reflection and understanding from different aspects of life such as family, friends, love languages, accomplishments and faith.

Capture Needs and Emotions Through Active Feedback, From Online to Offline

Through meetings with teachers, we aligned and adapted the original content into a gamified version with a mood board, graphics, reflective questions, lyrical and biblical references. Drawing from the student’s patterns on social media and favorite pop songs of their generation through a series of interviews, we incorporated these elements into the overall design with the aim to capture their daily instances and emotion to gain clarity and self-awareness.

We also suggested teaching staff to connect with students through the Instagram platform. We designed a key visual and renamed the program; teachers were enabled to use the graphic elements for future events as well, such as turning them into stickers. Together with our onsite installations, we were able to collect students’ feedback and interact with them outside the online world, drawing participation from over 100 teachers and students.

Internally, teachers were handed this notebook and given a tutorial on how to use it for the thanksgiving program as well as future events as well. It was a real collaboration experience where teachers and the principal found an innovative way to understand students more closely, participate more, learn how to use and share on the latest technology such as Instagram, interacting with students for shared moments and feedback.