Workshop - a semistructured interview
Aim of the interview and planned questions
As we had settled on the concept of making a game to prevent bullying we wanted and needed some more
knowledge about several aspects of children, the school system (ex.: what is already done to prevent
bullying and how equipped are teachers to deal with these dilemmas) and bullying. This is why we
decided to make a kind of workshop that would be a semi-structured interview with two students
studying to become teachers. They both had experience from work experience from internship and as
students was up-to-date with academic knowledge within these subjects.
We had prepared some questions we would like to know more about, and then would ask freely if
we thought they were talking about something we needed to know more about.
Our questions included (these are just a few I've picked out):
- Is it in the curriculum at your education to learn about how teachers and students socialize and how to create a safe and happy learning environment?
- Have you experienced bullying when you were interns? What did you do about it/what would you do?
How it went
Not to our surprise (after our research) the answer to both these quenstions was yes and the
conversation led to a deeber understanding than our research did. We also got some really needed
insights to the school-system we are working with and a better understanding of the maturity and
behavior of the children in our target-group.
The participants both gave concrete examples of bullying and children that generally were weren't
thriving, and were the solutions seemed to be out of reach for them as they often had difficulties
with the other children and socializing with them.
At some point we presented our concept to them and asked what they thought of it - would the children
and the teachers like if a game was implemented and what should we be aware of? Their responses were
positive towards the game-idea and pointed out that differentiated learning is important, especially
for the younger school children.
They also got us some really nice inputs towards which age groups would be the best to implement our
game so that it would be suitable and work as preventive.
What do we take with us?
We got some really good insights from this kind of workshop. I think it worked well with semi-structured interview as we could dig deeper into whatever we found necessary. The most important lessons we learned was:
- Specifying our target group to 3. and 4. grade students (according to danish schools), the age group here is mainly 9-12 year olds.
- Knowledge about the digital artefacts that they use or have access to in school. This is chromebooks (in Aarhus) and otherwise iPads/tablets. This was a necessarity for the project to work.
- They would suggest that the game should be multiplayer, but each child on their own device (otherwise one would take over the control)
- Competition among the children should not be individually ranked, but by classes - so that the class collect points together and compete in that sense.
- There is a law that requires that children are being taught both inclusiveness and digital behavior.