Storytelling, brainstorming and golden circles…
From 25/05 to 01/06, the ID College in Gouda, together with Emansion, DutchVR, and the Patching Zone team, organised a Virtual Reality Battle week for the students. The aim was to design a concept for a VR app as a promotional tool for the ID College Gouda, to be used at fairs. The initial concept of the event resembled the previously held VR Experience week in Zoetermeer, while taking the prior event’s evaluation into account.
On the 25th the students received an introductory lecture from EMansion about Virtual Reality. In the afternoon the students took part in several workshops organised in a rotating group system.
The Patching Zone team gave three workshops: storytelling, to incite the students to develop their concept as a story rather than a simple promotional tool; concept brainstorming, to try to develop original concepts; presentation, using Sinek’s Golden Circle method.
Storytelling
The storytelling workshop focused on four classical storytelling techniques, which were described using examples in fiction: the hero’s journey, the mountain, in medias res and the false start. Once the methods were described, the students were given basic elements of an absurd story and each team was asked to write a story using one of the methods. The stories were then read out loud and discussed.
Concept brainstorming
The “How could we…?” method is a typical brainstorming method when the aim is to solve a problem. The main problem is initially divided up into three or more sub-problems, making it easier to focus on specific aspects of a given challenge. The sub-problem may or may not be directly related to the larger question, depending on the context, since it might be necessary to analyse aspects of everyday life before zooming in on the main question.
For each question, an ideation round is held during which participants write down their ideas for that specific sub-problem, one idea per post-it. At the end of each round, the post-its are sorted into stacks: if one idea comes up more than three times, it becomes a theme and begins to show a possible direction a team might want to take.
Once every brainstorm round has been done, the team uses the best ideas from each round to formulate one or several concepts.
Simon Sinek’s Golden Circle
We organised a short workshop session on pitching methods, using Simon Sinek’s Golden Circle technique. This served as a reminder of the storytelling methods from the previous week and was meant to help the students in preparing their presentations at the end of the hackathon. Students initially struggled to define the “Why” or USP of their concept, confusing the client (ID College) with their end user (visitors of school fairs, future students and their parents). Eventually, they understood the exercice and could apply it to their concept. We went round each table to discuss their Why / How / What and each team presented their findings to the rest of the group.
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