Design Challenge
#3: How might we learn from COVID-19 to reimagine our future for life, work, learning and play?
Project Description
Carve is a daily planner for parents to balance work and family time efficiently. The current Circuit Breaker that push for a WFH and HBL situation is causing agony and distress among Parents and Caregivers. Biggest challenge is to find ways to keep kids occupied meaningfully and at the same time manage work and household chores. Carve syncs with your calendar to carve out customised learning activities catered to your child interests and learning styles, This is through slicing your day into multiple bite-sized activities, taking the erroneous task of planning away from parents, ensuring it does not clash with your scheduled meetings. During such meetings for both parents, the kids can be entertained with independent activities. Sit back and allow Carve to take over your planning chores.
Criteria #1: Value
Carve’s biggest value is taking away the hassle of planning and time taken for parents to find and execute meaningful activities for their kids. Juggling work and family (HBL and household chores) is a big feat, especially for those without helpers. Younger kids as well as those with special needs will need greater attention from parents managing their HBL. Therefore Carve aims to leverage on the extensive resources online to tailor to the different learning styles, interests and pace of children, at the same time ensuring the resources shared are mapped to MOE’s Curriculum. It also has another feature to include caregiver such as grandparents not staying in the same household, for scheduled virtual catchups when both parents are bogged down with work commitment at the same time.
Criteria #2: Inspiration
The many rants on my various group-chats and social media on how parents are struggling to juggle. That’s when i realised i am not alone in this, and that i am just as guilty with extended screen time just to ensure work can be done. Why a planner? Kids get bored very easily therefore it is a strain to figure out different activities every moment, and with families of kids with varying ages, it gets more demanding. A planner will help to plan your day for meaningfully and ensure time is adequately given to both work and family needs.
Criteria #3: Impact
INDEPENDENT, COLLABORATIVE AND TAILORED LEARNING
-Increase Independency for learning
-Tap on other learning resources online to boost learning
-Tailored and meaningful learning experiences, catered to children varying needs (inclusive to children with special needs)
INTANGIBLE BENEFITS
-Time saving for parents, from browsing though various channels to collate information)
-Maximise time and implement routine for both parents and children.
-Prevent burnout for parents and clash of caregiving duties (-better planning between spouses)
-Leverage of caregivers not in same household to provide virtual caregiving services – takes away isolation issues from them
-Introduce household chores such as folding clothes as part of the activities
Criteria #4: Timeliness
Mobile App Development – It is leveraging on the various resources already available online, therefore time and effort will be to pull this resources together and curate them. will be useful to get in stakeholders from MOE, ECDA, and STB to provide activities that are not only mapped to MOE’s curriculum, but also have a local flavour with STB onboard.
Criteria #5: Systems Thinking
Beyond a planner, Carve will set as a learning platform that is more inclusive to the needs of children with varying learning styles. The idea here is to use the app as a tool to eventually increase independency for learning among children, by matching interests, learning styles, duration and pace. This tailored approach aims to supplement various tools that are already in place such as SLS by MOE. It can also map to learning kits such as kiwico, a subscription based platform to ensure the learning is more holistic. Leveraging on the larger community to post activities will also help to maximise and speed up learning efforts.
