TRAILS Pick: Tackling Information Overload with Searchy

Suffering from information overload lately? Many Internet users feel that way doing an online search these days. Searching for just about anything yields thousands of hits. How does one decide which site has what one really needs?

Searchy helps students ask the right questions.

The need is particularly acute for children, who haven’t learned how to evaluate Web sites by considering their authorship, their timeliness, and the depth of their content. Three graduate students from a TRAILS-affiliated course at Stanford University recognized that need and designed an application to address it.

Searchy’s designers worked with a nearby science museum, The Tech Museum of Innovation in San Jose, to define a context for the application and determine the needs of the children who would use it. They settled on designing an application that would reinforce lessons already taught by the museum’s Web site. Developed into an interactive Flash presentation, the project is full of content that helps users on their way to becoming more information literate.

In the application, a character named “Searchy” guides the user through the complexities of searching. Searchy is not afraid to give users short lectures on the back-end of search engines nor is he hesitant to say when an answer completely misses the boat. Searchy is a character with a distinct personality that is designed to provide feedback in a humorous way when the user selects wrong answers.

Searchy organizes key questions in a "cheat sheet" to summarize the content.

The Stanford students did more than just design and develop the software itself. They user-tested it with K-12 students to verify that users were learning what was intended. They also created a Web site full of recommended activities and documentation for instructors and parents. It also shows how “Searchy” aligns with California’s Department of Education standards specifying what students should know about research skills.

The Searchy team was multidisciplinary. It consisted of a designer, an educator, and a software developer. Each brought their expertise to the task of designing and developing the application. The group thoroughly applied what they had learned about teaching, learning, and design in the course to create and test their application. Jennifer Knudsen, an SRI affliate helping to facilitate the Stanford course, noted, “I was impressed with the team’s dedicated approach to using each of the design principles they learned and their commitment to iterating on even the details of the project. The result was an application that elegantly achieved its goals.”

“Searchy” has helped launch the careers of its creators. Todd Jackson, who was the developer on the project team is now working for Google. Eric Bailey is currently a freelance product designer doing work for clients such as Stanford University Medical Media & Information Technologies (SUMMIT), for whom he’s developing interactive learning software. Bailey elaborates on what he’s applied from the course, “The concept of ‘backwards design’, in particular, designing assessments at the same time as establishing design principles, is transferable to any type of design problem such that it seems to shorten the gap between the user’s needs and the designer’s intention.”

Peter Worth does freelance online curriculum writing and will start an educational research assistant position at a research institution in the new year. Worth reflected on the course work, “The fact that we were able to go beyond the design stage and actually build an applet (thanks to our CS team member) brought the project beyond what we might have been able to do in some other courses.” When discussing the course’s emphasis on user testing he said, “Seeing our grand ideas fail or succeed in the hands of the learner was eye-opening.”

For more details
Look deeper into the project at the Gallery, Organizer, and Repository of Projects (GORP)
http://trails-project.org/webapps/gorp/ViewCurriculet.do?id=15&themeId=1

Try the curriculet
http://ldt.stanford.edu/~pworth/ed124x/searchy/Main.html

Contact info

For more information on TRAILS and ways to get involved, contact .

This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. 0205625. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.