Unstructured Studio

It is a fact that the current education system is top-down and rewards rote learning. This is especially true among the disadvantaged population, where the goal is to deliver basic numeracy and literacy skills to them. However, numerous studies have shown the importance of a student-centered, interactive, activity- based mode of learning in order to holistically shape an individual. Unstructured Studio was founded with the vision of building a movement where every child, anywhere in the world, has access to creative education. Our hope is for creative and activity-based learning to be accessible by every learner belonging to any and all strata of the society, notwithstanding their social, economical or other  backgrounds.

Our work is heavily inspired by the Four Guiding Principles of Creative Learning: Projects, Passion, Peers and Play by Mitchel Resnick and based on research at MIT Media Lab's Lifelong Kindergarten. According to these principles, people learn best when engaged in projects they are passionate about, with like-minded peers, in a safe and playful environment. One of our co-founders, Srishti Sethi,  spent three years at this Lab developing and researching online learning platforms, and Unstructured Studio builds upon her research. The Lifelong Kindergarten research group's work demonstrates that hands-on, open-ended, playful exploration with materials ("tinkering") contributes to richer learning experiences for children. When engaged in tinkering, children continuously revise their goals, explore new pathways, imagine new opportunities, and in this entire process, develop essential 4Cs of the 21st-century learning skills that are so crucial for children to thrive in today's world. Unstructured Studio develops tools, resources and activities based on this principle of 4Ps.

Rudrani is the first full-time staff member of our organization. She is based in India and is primarily responsible for strategy planning, and operational activities of the organization. This includes designing our next steps, facilitating workshops, partnering up with local organizations and fundraising. Her day-to-day responsibilities would include, researching and reaching out to organizations for partnership, brainstorming on collaboration opportunities, researching and contacting grant organizations and potential funders and conceive and conceptualize operational plans. She is also a skilled facilitator and leads workshops we hold with other organizations. 

Our team consists of our two brilliant and passionate co-founders, Srishti Sethi, whose work at MIT Media Lab started the formation of Unstructured Studio, and Suchakra Sharma. Both of them currently reside and work in the USA and Canada, respectively, but their passion is in working with the underserved in their home country, India, and bring about the change in the collective Indian mindset, so that education can become a more creative, enjoyable and playful experience for everyone. Our third permanent member is Rudrani Ghosh, our Learning Program Manager, who is currently located in India, and leads our on-ground operations. 

Rudrani has proven herself to be adept at time management and is successfully juggling multiple tasks as stated by her role. Srishti and Suchakra both already have full-time jobs but are fully committed to the organization, and are constantly present in all the organizational decisions. 

Currently, one of our main goals is strengthening our evidence base, in order to record our impact with our beneficiaries. We are ready to prioritize this, and make ourselves available for the required period of time.

ZubHub is a free and open-source tool for activity-based learning available for custom-use in libraries, schools, hackerspaces, educational organizations etc.

Creativity has been stated as an essential 21st Century skill. Renowned educators like Ken Robinson have advocated for nurturing creativity in a classroom setting alongside numeracy and literacy; a LinkedIn.com study has also ranked creativity as among the top 15 skills that employers want. However, in low-income countries like India, skills like creativity and collaboration take a backseat over a more pressing need of teaching learners numeracy and literacy skills. Many people, including Steve Wozniak and Sundar Pichai, have spoken about the creativity crisis in India. A lack of creativity discourages questioning, communication, experimentation and ultimately draws students towards rote learning, leading to stifling their cognitive and affective development. While this crisis is a core part of the current education system, it severely affects learners from low-income households, who do not have any alternate resources in place to boost their creative skills. This results in an uneven and unfair distribution of skills that no child should be deprived of.

ZubHub is an open-source, documentation & collaboration tool for activity-based learning available for custom-use in local schools, libraries, hackerspaces and other educational organizations. It is based on MIT Media Lab’s Lifelong Kindergarten’s 4Ps of learning- Projects, Passion, Peers and Play. ZubHub is completely free and developed with the intention of expanding project-based learning opportunities to children in under-resourced communities worldwide; India being the current focus. On ZubHub, children and educators can get inspired by a collection of activity ideas and projects, learn how to build with the materials and tools they already have access to, and share their creations with others. Some of the primary features of ZubHub are creator portfolios, community-curated projects, discussion-based collaboration, and monthly workshops. 

ZubHub is a customisable tool, and other organizations can host a decentralized version of it to build learning communities, revolving around their own activities. Organizations can even self-host it in low or no-internet bandwidth areas. Essentially, multiple ZubHubs can be run independently by different educational organizations - having content and activities relevant to them. 

While our focus is on activity or play-based learning, it also hinges on the fact that everyone learns differently. ZubHub encourages one’s own expression of creativity through trying to build a community of creative learners worldwide. Our complementary activities also reflect our belief in learning variability-  they are meant to be interpreted in their own way by the learners themselves, and inspire them to follow their own imagination. In our activities, children are guided, rather than instructed, towards making the activities themselves, and are encouraged to fully explore their creativity.

Formative research (e.g. usability studies; feasibility studies; case studies; user interviews; implementation studies; pre-post or multi-measure research; correlational studies)

In the summer of 2020, we launched a pilot for our Kriti program in order to address the inequities intrinsic in the field of activity-based learning and tinkering for children in India. We conducted eight tinkering activities over a course of two months, with 77 children, conducted at an interval of 1 activity per week. Students who participated in this pilot were comfortable with 2-3 of these languages: Hindi, Gujarati, and English. We ensured that most of the students had a similar socioeconomic background and were either from lower or middle-income families in rural or semi-urban areas. We aimed to design the pilot in a manner that we could include activities that had the common denominator elements in them in terms of access to building materials and resources. This way, we were able to accommodate everyone. The children had tremendous support and guidance from their teachers to participate in our program, continually motivating them in many ways and through various channels (direct phone calls, WhatsApp messages, etc.). To evaluate the efficacy of our program, we incorporated suggestions by (Brennan & Resnick, 2012) and included artifact-based interviews and design scenarios into our process. To understand how children engaged in the maker activities, their making and documentation process, their motivations and needs, and to make enhancements to the program iteratively, we interviewed ten children who participated in the pilot. We also kept a manual track of the statistics and conversations in the chat, which were necessary to understand the overall impact. In addition, from time to time, we talked with teachers informally to get their impression.

Through this pilot, we helped facilitate maker activities remotely for children from under-resourced settings. We were indeed able to target the audience that was our main focus for this pilot. By encouraging the use of low-cost materials, we could engage kids in maker activities without any barriers. Even in the times of a global pandemic, they could perform these activities without stepping out of their homes to obtain materials. 

Fifty students developed 74 projects for eight maker activities. The activities spanned various categories, from simple ones such as creating a model of a chain reaction, to developing mechanical toys. 22% of students' projects were unique in terms of variations in materials or shape than in the original guides or demo videos. 

One of our goals for the program was to encourage children to document their projects. Typical Indian educational settings do not generally encourage vocal participation by the learners. We wanted to create an atmosphere where they will feel motivated enough to want to talk about creations. Through these activities, we asked them to document their projects by

making a video of it and answering questions pertinent to the project such as, the motivation behind their creation or materials used.

27% of projects we received were in a video and audio format. Very few of them answered the questions we asked them. The majority of the students in the interview shared that it was their first time performing a documentation-based activity around making.  Some younger students expressed that they found the documentation questions hard; for example, they didn't quite understand what "motivation" meant. We tried to instigate peer interaction, but without much success.

Overall, we identified a clear need to do more work to empower children to document their projects and share them with peers, and not hesitate to share their thoughts and be confident learners. Based on the findings of this pilot, we wanted to evolve our documentation and community platforms to support more kids and develop tools for educators and organizers to help reflect on the engagement activity to ensure everything is ongoing smoothly and if/when they should chime in for help. There needs to be constant work to change these kids' mindsets, so they shift towards a more collaborative rather than a competitive outlook. This pilot conducted in 2020, gave us necessary data and pushed us to create a platform for children to document their expressions of creativity, which took the form of ZubHub in 2021.

Unstructured Studio has been in existence for a little over a year and a half and was started by two co-founders based in the US and Canada. In this time, we have launched our own activities, our platform named ZubHub, conducted numerous workshops, and received a grant of $10,000 from Digital Ocean’s Hollie’s Hub for Good grant. We used this grant to hire a Learning Program Manager based out of India, where primarily our programs take place. She is in-charge of our operational activities there. 

Currently, we have signed an MoU with an organization which is going to bring a sizable number of users onto our platform, ZubHub. We are also planning on conducting multiple workshops with local partners which should again, give a boost to the number of users. However, as we keep expanding, we inevitably face the same question, “How do you measure your impact?” 

We believe that right now is the perfect time to find an answer to this question. We have a stable product with multiple interested parties, and we have entered into a stage where we can start comfortably growing. But in order to expand further, we need to back up our innovation with an evidence base.

1. What would a creativity assessment framework to quantifiably measure the benefit of a platform like ZubHub would look like? 

2. How do we measure the long term effects of our projects & programs on our learners & educators?

3. How can a digital tool like ZubHub bring a systemic change in current methods of creative teaching & learning? 

4. [Stretch] What are some effective ways to use ZubHub as a communication tool to document and provide feedback on activity-based projects?

We hope that by the end of this project, we will have a clearer idea on how we can measure the impact we have on users. As of now, while we are operationally expanding, we are yet to create a strong evidence database on how ZubHub is positively affecting a child’s learning.  Right now, the connection between ZubHub and the 4Cs of 21st Century skills is based on the theory our model is based on- the 4Ps of Creative Learning. However, we want to understand how we can create a metric to quantifiably measure this connection, difficult as it may be. Based on the above, we want to understand how our programs are benefiting our audience  in the short as well as long term. 

We also want to understand how a digital tool like ZubHub can bring a systemic change in the current creative learning environment. Documentation is not something that is given much importance, even in offbeat creative learning settings. We want to figure out if an overarching change in the mindset of learners and educators can actually be possible through this. 

Lastly, we want to understand how ZubHub can be used  as a tool for documentation and feedback on activity-based projects. This will help us develop the platform further.

Right now, our main focus as an organization are threefold- 

• Expanding our reach by partnering with more and more local organizations

• Fundraising through multiple grants

• Developing ZubHub through user feedback

All three of these focus areas are heavily dependent on forming a solid evidence base. Once we have a clear understanding of this, we will start advertising them through our website and social media channels. Our pitch to our potential partners and funders will also become more convincing. 

We are about to turn three years in a few months, and will become eligible for CSR fundings and partnerships. This will give us another outlet for expansion. However, following through this will become very difficult without proper evidence of impact. If we understand what kind of change ZubHub is capable of bringing, it will make it smoother for us to convince partners and funders. 

Once we can quantifiably measure the impact we have on the ground, we will be able to make necessary changes as required on the platform to exponentially increase said impact as well. In this scenario, understanding how to use ZubHub as a communication tool to document and provide feedback on activity-based projects will help us make ZubHub more interesting and easy to use.

As mentioned before, we believe this project will support us extensively in creating a strong framework for us to collect the evidence we require. This will help us forge stronger local and international partnerships for our platform, ZubHub, and will increase our appeal to granters and other funders. We will also be using this framework to collect feedback on ZubHub, in order to modify and polish it further.  

In the long-run, we want to be registered as a section 8 company in India, and be eligible for international donations as per the FCRA laws, as well as for CSR funding. We believe being able to show how our work has been beneficial to the communities will help us in receiving said funding. 

Lastly, all of this ties back to our main goal, the expansion of ZubHub and being able to help the children in underserved communities.