Supporting Variation Among Learners

During my Spring semester, I took a course on Accessible and Inclusive design. This course focused on how we can design for learners with varying abilities.

One of my biggest take-aways from this course is that we need to consider variation among learners proactively, not retroactively. That is, we cannot create our design for the "average" user first and then add in retrofits for users with disabilities or varying abilities. Instead, we must design for all types of learners from the get-go.

When we consider learners with disabilities while we are designing, we will improve our design for all learners, including those without disabilities. For example, if we ensure that our design is usable for someone with a memory disability, we will improve our design for learners who may have difficulty remembering or paying attention in class. When we design for the margins, we improve our design for everyone.

In addition to consider learners with disabilities, we must also consider learners from different backgrounds, and with different amounts of prior knowledge. This is especially important when designing for a museum setting, when you will have all different types of learners interacting with your designs. For example, there may be tourists from different countries who do not speak English well—to help with this, we can include visual instructions. There may be families with both a child and a teenager, so we can include tangible pieces that are interesting for young children and also more in-depth extensions that are interesting for older learners with more background knowledge. In my Immunity project, I made sure my design would be accessible to learners with less prior knowledge and created an extension activity that would be exciting for learners with more background in biology.

This connects to my personal goals and interests, as I hope to design for informal STEM learning environments. In these types of environments, there will be a significant amount of variation among learners. Through my designs, I hope to help a variety of learners to learn about and identify with STEM.