Fun Facts

It's Searchy, your irreverent tour guide along the information superhighway! He helps kids pay attention to authorship, timeliness and content quality when sifting through the internet for useful information.

Design Challenge

Suffering from information overload lately? Many Internet users feel that way doing an online search these days. Searching for just about anything yields thousands of hits. How does one decide which site has what one really needs? The need is particularly acute for children, who haven't learned how to evaluate Web sites by considering their authorship, their timeliness, and the depth of their content. Three graduate students at Stanford University recognized that need and designed an application to address it.

Context/Client

Searchy's designers worked with a nearby science museum, The Tech Museum of Innovation in San Jose, to define a context for the application and determine the needs of the children who would use it. They settled on designing an application that could reside on the museum's Web site as a supplement to content introduced in an exhibit. Developed into an interactive Flash presentation, the project is full of content that helps users on their way to becoming more information literate.

Approach

In the application, an engine named "Searchy" guides the user through the complexities of making sense of search results. Searchy begins by giving users a short lecture on the inner workings of search engines before walking them through an interactive tutorial.

Searchy starts off being politely instructional, but give him the wrong answer, and he won't hesitate to set you straight. His character was designed to humorously challenge the learner to engage with the instructional content, while scaffolding the learner's understanding and application of the three evaluation criteria.

Testing

The Stanford students did more than just design and develop the software itself. They user-tested it with middle school students to verify that users were learning what was intended, and that the character and content were engaging. They also created a Web site full of recommended activities and documentation for instructors and parents. It also shows how "Searchy" aligns with California's Department of Education standards specifying what students should know about research skills.

The Team

The Searchy team was multidisciplinary. It consisted of a designer, an educator, and a software developer. Each brought their expertise to the task of designing and developing the application. The group thoroughly applied what they had learned about teaching, learning, and design in the course to create and test their application. Jennifer Knudsen, an SRI affliate helping to facilitate the Stanford course, noted, "I was impressed with the team's dedicated approach to using each of the design principles they learned and their commitment to iterating on even the details of the project. The result was an application that elegantly achieved its goals."

Looking Back & Moving Forward

"Searchy" has helped launch the careers of its creators. Todd Jackson, who was the developer on the project team is now working for Google.

Eric Bailey is currently a Principal Designer at Frog Design, a global strategic creative consultancy. He specializes in the design of digitally integrated products aimed at transforming behavior and the human condition, and has developed solutions for personal health management, fitness, and learning. Bailey elaborates on what he's applied from the course, "The concept of 'backwards design', in particular, designing assessments at the same time as establishing design principles, is transferable to any type of design problem such that it seems to shorten the gap between the user's needs and the designer's intention."

Peter Worth is a research associate at an educational research, development, and services agency. Worth reflected on the course work, "The fact that we were able to go beyond the design stage and actually build an applet (thanks to our CS team member) brought the project beyond what we might have been able to do in some other courses." When discussing the course's emphasis on user testing he said, "Seeing our grand ideas fail or succeed in the hands of the learner was eye-opening."

Visit the project in Gorp