In teams of 6, work together to create something technical (app, data exploration, algorithm, hardware, etc.) that improves Duke (or education more generally), perhaps based on your experience during COVID.
- Your team does not have to know how to implement the technological solutions you propose, the goal of this activity is primarily about coming up with ideas.
- Your team’s ideas should not overlap a project someone in the team wants to pitch to the class as their semester project idea.
This exercise will be conducted in three Stages (lasting roughly 10 minutes each).
- After each Stage, we will call on some teams to present their results so that all teams present at some point during the exercise.
- Use this slide deck to take notes about your team’s ideas and respond to each Stage’s activity.
Stage 1
Start off by introducing yourselves!
- Name, and what was the best thing about your Summer?
As a team, decide on:
- a problem to work on
- the motivation for working on that problem
- at least two ideas for how something technical could make a difference for this problem
Questions to think about as you consider different ideas. You do not need to answer all of these explicitly, but some of them may be helpful brainstorming prompts.
- What strengths do we have and how could we use them?
- What do we want to learn and how could we use those skills?
- What is the problem we want to solve or the opportunity we want to take?
- What features or findings would be necessary to solve the problem?
- Who is the audience for our idea? Who cares about it?
- What is novel and innovative about our idea?
- What is risky and challenging about our idea?
- Would we be excited to work on this? Would we be proud to complete it?
- What could go wrong with this?
Stage 2
Continue introducing yourselves!
- What is the best (your interpretation) project experience in Computer Science you have had (in or out of school)?
Apply the Design Thinking SCAMPER activity to your problem by exploring it, and your ideas, through these seven different lenses to expand the set of possible ideas your team generates.
As a team decide on:
- the four ideas your team think are most promising
Four should be more than you came up with in the first Stage, and fewer than you generated using the SCAMPER technique.
Stage 3
Continue introducing yourselves!
- Have you ever felt that you had the opportunity to be creative in CompSci/tech/research? Why or why not?
Apply the Design Thinking Five Whys activity to your problem by repeatedly asking “why” to get to its core. Use this technique to expand any of your idea’s applicability by possibly finding more essential or general problems. Along the way, each answer may also generate different approaches to use technology or attack the problem.
As a team decide on:
- the two best ideas from all that you have discussed
- for each idea, three expected positive impacts on your problem
