My journey using CBL
I started my journey as a student in Apple Developer Academy — UFPE in February 2020. After the onboarding that happened in the first month, we were asked to work on our first challenge. We used CBL as the method to achieve our goals.
What is CBL?
"Challenge Based Learning (CBL) provides an efficient and effective framework for learning while solving real-world challenges. The framework fuels collaboration to identify big ideas, ask thoughtful questions, and identify, investigate and solve challenges. CBL helps learners gain deep subject area knowledge and develop the skills necessary to thrive in an ever-changing world". — https://www.challengebasedlearning.org
Using CBL, in my personal experience, was the best way to make my ideas flow easily and to build a strong foundation for the project I wanted to work on.
The process
CBL is divided in 3 main steps. They consist in:
- Big Idea
- Essential Question
- Challenge
That's why I'm dividing this article in 3 steps too!
My Big Idea
A good big idea doesn't come out of nowhere. Some heuristics (parameters) should be considered. For this project, I came up with a set of different drafts for my big idea and made some considerations to decide which one I wanted to work on. For making this choice, I considered these following questions:
- How interested am I on this topic?
- How much am I going to learn?
- What is the potential for innovation?
I answered these questions using the answers "a lot", "more or less" or "a little". The idea that got all the "a lot" answers was the "Museums and Art" one. That's why I decided to go through with it.
With this decision made, I started to scratch the mental map down below:
I decided to go through the social impact topic and, after that, a foundation for a good Essential Question was being shaped.
My Essential Question
An essential question is a question that gives a direction to a challenge. Choosing an essential question, just like choosing a big idea, demands some heuristics too.
First thing is to create some guiding questions that will lead to some possible essential questions. Mine were:
- Does new artists want their art works displayed on famous museums?
- Are people willing to pay to see these art works?
- Are famous museums willing to display new art works?
- Why is it difficult to link curators and artists sometimes?
After that, I defined some key-words that appeared on my guiding questions:
- New artists
- Famous museums
- Curators
- Art works
Even though I already had something on my mind, I wanted to be really sure about it. That's where the morphological box enters.
A morphological box consists on a table in which its columns represents some aspects of what is desirable to create or to study and then combine these elements to make a possible essential question.
Using the elements I found on my key words, my morphological box ended up like this:
The morphological box confirmed that I was going on the right direction and I choose the essential question considering:
- Motivation
- Learning
- Impact scale
Again, I answered with "a lot", "more or less" and "a little".
The winning essential question was "How to improve the chances of new artists getting their work displayed on museums?".
Yay! Everything set! Now let's move on to the challenge.
My Challenge
Challenges in CBL are the answers for essential questions. Just like the other steps, it's important to keep in mind some good practices.
First, a main goal should be set, a goal that may be absurd or impossible but that's the intention of it. My absurd goal was "Creating a way that every art work reaches a curator".
I made a Create vs Eliminate table to help me finding out what challenge would fit my essential question and my absurd goal the most.
Analyzing these options, I mixed and matched to obtain a set of options for possible challenges.
The heuristics for the choice of the challenge, this time, were:
- Motivation
- Feasibility
- Desirability
And, again using the intensity answers, my challenge was set: "Eliminating communication barriers between art curators and artists".
With the challenge set, the concept for a solution (created after a long brainstorming session) was "A quiz game that makes questions about new artists and also shares their profiles so curators can get to know their art better".
Going through this process was really amazing and I learned a lot! After all this journey, I prototyped my quiz game and used Swift Playgrounds for the programming part.
I will leave a link to my portfolio down below so I can share the design results
Thank you for reading! My name is Marina Savluchinske and I'm a student in Apple Developer Academy — UFPE.