We have completed two more workshops in order to understand the requirements of our prospective ENACT app users: one in Newcastle and one in Istanbul.
The workshop in the UK took place on 25 January with 11 participants from N.E.S.T and Action Foundation. It was such a multilingual event with speakers of English, Arabic, and Farsi, but also some Turkish and Chinese. We used the N.E.S.T building at Newcastle University, and N.E.S.T were amazing in supporting our organisation from providing language support to child care. We cannot thank them enough! And of course special thanks to our participants, who we hope enjoyed being part of our workshop. Two of our Applied Linguistics students, Trang Nguyen and Rixin An, were very supportive, too!
It was a great experience working together. We talked about the favourite cultural activities of the community and what activities of other cultures they would like to learn. The participants found our digital activities (prototypes) to be engaging, but the 360 video they watched on Google Cardboard, and the 360 camera appeared to attract the most attention! Although they enjoyed engaging with this media, producing 360 videos appeared to be a challenge. Another important feedback for us was to include the video of the final product first to put the artefact in context, and then present the digital activities on how to carry it out.
The workshop in Turkey took place on 4 February 2020. Boğaziçi University is working closely with a primary school in Turkey, who have a significant number of Syrian children. The head of school has strong leadership, and is keen to enhance the integration of the Syrian and Turkish communities both in his school and in the neighbourhood. Working with pupils’ parents, the workshop took place at the school. During the workshop, as participants talked about their own cultural activities, they also discussed commonalities in both cultures. Their existing knowledge of each other’s cultures appeared to enhance social and cultural climate of the workshop activities. Not all participants needed the interactivity added on the interactive videos, and rewinding back and forth seemed to be sufficient for this group. We will appraise the added value of interactive videos further as we develop our app.
We are currently analysing the data from the three workshops. Once the workshop in Barcelona is complete, we will incorporate it into our current analysis, and will be ready to share our report.
“I really enjoyed the session and all the people involved. It was lovely to see people from all cultures and backgrounds in a safe environment. … It was a wonderful experience. Let’s build more wonderful experiences!”
Post-workshop email correspondence, UK
Looking forward to creating more wonderful experiences together!
12/02/2020