Running head: COMMUNITY ACTIONS PROJECT - CIVIC NEBRASKA 1

Community Action Project - Civic Nebraska

Sam H. Ali, Luke L. Andreasen, Beni B. Csordas, Dillon M. Falkinburg, Jackson R. Haselhorst,

Lucas M. Miller, Jonah D. Reiser, Nathan C. Renard, Trevor J. Thomas, Joshua A. Welling

University of Nebraska at Omaha

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Civic Nebraska Community Action Project

Introduction and Non-Profit Background

This semester, our ten-person group worked with the non-profit Civic Nebraska to help

enrich after-school programs around Nebraska by prototyping a lego-based emotional health tool

for students. We created empathy probes to identify a problem in one of these after school

programs and used them to ideate a solution for the problems they highlighted. We will soon be

applying this idea in a few select middle schools in Omaha. This paper is a record of our efforts

throughout this process.

Civic Nebraska is dedicated to creating a modern and robust democracy for all

Nebraskans. Their methods for doing so fall into 3 main branches: civic health, voting rights, and

youth civic leadership. The civic health branch encourages communities to collaborate, and

works to improve neighborhoods through a variety of projects. The voting rights branch helps

Nebraskans to know how to vote and why they should, and supports non-partisan political issues

like officials being appointed without elections. We worked mainly with the youth civic

leadership branch, which runs after-school programs to teach children to be leaders while

assisting them with their schoolwork. Many of us were passionate about working with this

division because our initial goal in assisting Civic Nebraska was to help its after-school programs

thrive; it didn’t hurt that its director, Kent Day, works on campus, making meeting with him

easier than it would be otherwise. In our interactions with schools, students, and faculty, we

discovered a problem that we felt needed a solution.

Problem Statement
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Civic Nebraska holds after-school programs at schools across the state, and we

specifically visited Lothrop Elementary School, Lewis and Clark Middle School, and Lincoln

Northeast High School to gain observations from all three levels of education, as well as schools

from both Omaha and Lincoln. We performed empathy probes on students and site workers at

each location, and listened to many stories of the day-to-day struggles they faced.

A common thread we saw was that many students struggled during homework time -

even though site workers and teachers were available at each location, students wouldn’t

communicate that they were struggling. As a result, homework time inevitably became an

inefficient and fruitless effort for many students who needed help but couldn’t signal so. Thus we

decided to make our grand challenge for this project encouraging students in these after-school

programs to get help by devising a simple system of communication between students and

teachers to check on emotional wellness and self-perception.

Review of Design Thinking Process

To preface the next section, we’d like to provide an overview of the Design Thinking

process, which is divided into five steps: empathizing, defining, ideation, prototyping, and

testing.

The first step of the design thinking process, empathizing, is crucial in getting to the heart

of problems and is key for human-centered design. Additionally, empathizing with individuals

allows one to get rid of their own assumptions about both the individual and the problem to be

solved. Our team utilized numerous empathy probes to understand Civic Nebraska on a deeper

level. We visited after school programs at multiple schools including Lincoln Northeast High,

Lothrop Elementary, and Lewis and Clark Middle. Further, empathy probes were completed with
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students in the after school program, teachers, site directors, executive coordinators and others.

An example of one such empathy probe is from Lewis and Clark Elementary. Sam Ali and Luke

Andreasen spoke with Tasia, a shy but motivated student at Lewis and Clark middle school. We

were surprised to learn that despite there being adequate resources, Tasia was frustrated with the

designated after-school homework time because she felt like she was never making progress and

that this was her own fault.

The second stage of the design thinking process, defining, determines the needs and

problems that have been made apparent by empathy probes. After empathizing with people, we

use the emotional low points in their experiences to pinpoint problems they face on a regular

basis. This phase is important because people may not always be aware of what exactly they are

struggling with or why they are having a problem; their problem is ours to identify and solve.

Tasia’s lowest point was during homework time. She struggled to understand the material

and made little progress on her work, resulting in her blaming herself for not understanding.

When this problem was brought before our group, we came to the conclusion that she had the

resources to learn but did not feel comfortable using them: teachers and mentors were available

to assist her and even some of her peers were capable of explaining the material. We believed

this problem was probably not specific to Tasia and concluded that other students might be

uncomfortable asking for additional help, whether they were afraid of the stigma from getting up

to talk to the teacher or unsure who else could help them.

Ideation, or producing possible solutions for our defined problem, comes next. The most

critical part of the design thinking process is considering all possible suggestions from all

members of the group, regardless of their feasibility. Even the unrealistic solutions had to
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potential to become “game changing” once rethought or rephrased. After spending a fair amount

of time sharing and discussing ideas, our group came to a consensus on the two we believed were

best: implementing Legos to display emotions and progress to the teacher (an improvement to a

chart Lewis and Clark Middle School already used), or an anonymous question box and exit

survey. These two ideas were then expanded on through a process in which each member of our

group could add specific additions to each idea. For example, the question box could look like a

Super Mario question block to make it more appealing to the students, or a block could be added

to the Lego tower to show a student’s willingness to help others. We wanted to encourage an

environment where students felt comfortable helping each other so they could both gain a better

understanding of the material and be more comfortable communicating with their peers.

Fourth is the prototype phase, where the final idea is fleshed out and a rough product is

made. Our group decided to move forward with the Lego tower displaying the students’ feelings

during homework time. Our prototype was a small model of the different ways students could

customize their tower to express themselves for the teacher to see, composed of a typical Lego

baseplate and bricks of various colors and sizes. A tower of three bricks was built on one end of

the plate, with each level decreasing in brick size. A more detailed description will be provided

later, in section E.

The last (but not least) step of the design thinking process is testing, which is concerned

with implementing the prototype, observing its impact, and determining if it met the needs it was

designed to. From here, other stages are revisited as necessary to perfect the prototype before a

final product is released. Our current plan is to put our prototype into use at Lewis and Clark
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Middle School to test our design; from there we will revisit earlier stages of the Design Thinking

process as necessary to improve it.

Prototype Description

The primary goal of our prototype is to increase and streamline communication between

students and staff Civic Nebraska’s after-school programs. Seeing as how these programs have a

high teacher-to-student ratio, it can’t be that more teachers are needed to resolve a

communication bottleneck; rather, what is needed is a means of normalizing the process of

asking for help. Students currently see needing help with homework as a bad thing. They believe

it means they’re not as smart as their classmates, and that raising their hand to call attention to

themselves makes it plainly obvious. To combat these negative feelings and highly ingrained

views on needing help, it would be game-changing if we could encourage students to ask for

help by devising a system of communication through which teachers can check on students’

emotional wellness and self-perception. If everyone has to go through the process of evaluating

their own emotional state and confidence in their schoolwork, then the individual needs of each

student become less obvious to everyone else. A system like this would give students more

self-assurance when asking for help along with assisting teachers in determining who needs their

help most.

Proposed Prototype Solution

When designing our prototype, we decided that legos would be a way to normalize

communication between students and teachers that would be both creative and effective. We

decided to use a baseplate, three layers of “communication” bricks, and reserved the rest of the

baseplate for the kids to build whatever they wanted.

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The first layer of bricks represents the students’ general mood of the day, to assist the

teachers in gaining a general idea of how the student is doing. The colors used here are based on

an energy/pleasantness chart we found during one of our school visits with four colors - yellow,

green, blue, and red - each representing a different mood. Yellow represents high energy and

high pleasantness, green low energy high pleasantness, blue low energy low pleasantness, and

red high energy low pleasantness.

The second tier of the lego tower uses a traffic light system to display the student’s

attitude towards the homework where green means they’re good to go and don’t need help,

yellow means they’re a little less confident on the subject and might need help, and finally, red

means that they don’t understand at all and need help. The last level on the lego reports the

student’s position on peer mentoring, or their willingness to assist other students. A white brick

on top means they want to help students, and a black brick on top means they don’t.

Anticipated Impact

While we cannot yet know how much of an impact our prototype will have in practice, in

theory at least we believe its biggest effect will be allowing students to feel more confident in

asking for help by making the help they’re asking for both less obvious to their classmates and

clearer to the teacher. Needless to say, this is not the only anticipated effect, but this was both

our initial design challenge as well as the focus of the prototype in question.

In addition to this central focus, by the inclusion of a method to signal one’s willingness

to help others and an adaptation of an already-present system to signal mood, we hope to

streamline extant classroom processes and allow students to learn and grow through their

interactions with their peers, rather than just their teachers.

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In the long-term, our goal for this prototype is to normalize asking for help in this

after-school program setting. From our empathy probes, we saw that though resources were

available, students didn’t use them - not for difficulty in taking advantage of the opportunities to

get help, but because they didn’t want to, whether from an attached stigma or the spotlight effect.

By allowing students to discreetly ask for assistance, we hope that publicly asking for help will

slowly be normalized, allowing students to ask for help without the need for our prototype, in

whatever form it may be in at the time. In short, we hope that our prototype will eventually

become obsolete because it’s solved the problem we set out to alleviate.

Next Steps of Implementation

As of the present moment we have designed our prototype and presented it to the head of

the Educational Branch of Civic NE, Kent Day; our next step in helping Civic NE is to

implement it in their after-school programs. We plan to first test it at Lewis & Clark Middle

School because they already have and use the emotional wellness (energy vs. pleasantness) chart,

simplifying the implementation process. Once piloted, the prototype design will be altered based

on feedback from the students and staff at Lewis and Clark’s program to better benefit the

students. We also discussed with Kent about having the students at Lewis & Clark help teach

students from other Civic NE schools how to use the prototype; if it’s well received, and we have

the go ahead from Kent, we plan to implement it in the other elementary schools that host Civic

Nebraska’s program. While our first game-changing idea seems small-scale, it is the first of

many such ideas, and we hope that their combined effect will have a positive impact on learning

within our community. Our emotional wellness lego tower has been the only game-changing idea

we’ve fully ideated, but we have several others that we’d love to get rolling. One of the things
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we’d like to do over the course of the next few years working with Civic NE, though, is to get

involved with its other branches to see if any improvements would be helpful there.

Summary of Group Process

The Civic Nebraska team mainly functioned as a heavily decentralized structure. No roles were

ever explicitly declared; we simply defined what needed to be accomplished and who was best

able to accomplish it. Through this method each team member was able to contribute where his

strengths best fit while balancing their other priorities. For example, during group discussions

discourse was unregulated until one of us would draw the group’s attention to an issue that had

to be addressed. Furthermore, this was exemplified when dividing up the workload of empathy

probes and visiting schools. There were many schools to target, and as such we divided into

groups simply by availability and convenience. The decentralized structure was disadvantageous

in that it allowed discussion to stray, and assumed each member would hold themselves

accountable, but by and large it worked well. This form of group interaction developed naturally

and flowed smoothly.

Individual Takeaways

Luke: I learned how in a team each person can utilize their special talents in different

ways to make the team successful.

Jackson: I learned that the real “design thinking process” is the friendship we made along

the way.

Jonah: I learned about the importance of timely and effective communication within a

team.
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Josh: I learned how to better make a difference working from the rear and not necessarily

leading the charge.

Dillon: I learned how to better empathize with others, both on my team and others that

are related to the project.

Sam: I learned how to collaborate with others much more effectively, and I learned the

intricacies of the design process.

Trevor: I learned even though it may feel as if progress is not being made and a project is

stagnating, continual work will always prevail.

Lucas: I found how to make meetings with only a few members be useful, sometimes

even more than meetings with many members.

Nathan: I learned not to cling to my initial thoughts, and to better express my opinions.

Beni: I learned to be more accepting of others’ ideas even if I don’t necessarily like or

agree with them initially.

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Cost Estimation

There are two main ways in which the necessary legos can be procured, either by buying

directly from the Lego Group via the Pick a Brick store or by buying lego from a third party

seller through an online store. Each option has its pros and cons.

Purchasing from Pick a Brick:

Piece type Indiv. Price (LEGO Amount needed Cost

Pick a Brick)

6x10 plate, black $0.86 80 68.8

2x6 brick, red $0.29 80 23.2

2x6 brick, yellow $0.29 80 23.2

2x6 brick, green $0.29 80 23.2

2x6 brick, blue $0.29 80 23.2

2x4 brick, red $0.21 80 16.8

2x4 brick, yellow $0.21 80 16.8

2x4 brick, green $0.21 80 16.8

2x2 brick, white $0.14 80 11.2

2x2 brick, black $0.14 80 11.2

Random bricks for ???

building

Total Cost $233.60 +

shipping
Buying directly from Lego is expensive but guarantees quality and is highly scalable to large
volumes. Buying from Lego may be a poor choice during prototyping due to the expense but is the best
and most likely only way to purchase large quantities of lego if the prototype is successful.
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Purchasing from Third Party:

Piece type Indiv. Price (LEGO Amount needed Cost

shop)

6x10 plate, black $0.33 80 26.4

2x6 brick, red $0.13 80 10.4

2x6 brick, yellow $0.13 80 10.4

2x6 brick, green $0.13 80 10.4

2x6 brick, blue $0.13 80 10.4

2x4 brick, red $0.06 80 4.8

2x4 brick, yellow $0.06 80 4.8

2x4 brick, green $0.09 80 7.2

2x2 brick, white $0.04 80 3.2

2x2 brick, black $0.04 80 3.2

Random bricks for ???

building

Total Cost $91.20

+shipping
Purchasing from a third party is the much cheaper option with legos costing half to a third as
much per brick depending on condition. The downside is that it can be difficult to find a single seller for
large enough quantities of lego bricks. In addition bricks may sometimes need to be purchased used, so
the quality is more variable.