Executive function after corona

I excel at executive function. I believe this mainly because I bike in New York City - a busy place filled with drivers also eager to get where they’re going - and I LIVE in New York City, where when you leave the house, you’re not going back until your day is through. There’s no “throw a sweater or my baseball glove in the trunk so it’s there when I need it” - if you need it, you must carry it. Based on these two things, I believe that my extra practice in executive function has made me excellent at it.

Executive function is the term used in early childhood development to describe some very grown up skills. Things like planning and saving and remembering to pack a sweater are all grown up manifestations of having exceptional executive function. Common tests for this in child development are the famous marshmallow test - where a child is given a marshmallow, and told to wait to eat it until the researcher comes back, at which time they would be given two marshmallows. Thinking to future rewards, managing your needs and wants, and inhibiting initial reactions are the core elements of executive function.

As I’m thinking about coronavirus and how it will change childhood and development of young kids, I think about all of the NEW things that kids have to think about suddenly - all of this practice that kids are getting in executive function. While kids used to have to inhibit their chattiness when it came to talking to strangers, now they have to think about being near strangers or playing on the playground after a stranger has played there. They have to take the time to put on shoes before they go out a play, but they also have to remember to put on gloves and a clean mask. Won’t all of this extra precaution mean that kids will gain executive function earlier than their predecessors in history? Just like living in NYC gives you extra practice at the skills of executive function, doesn’t practicing executive function in a children’s context make kids better at it?

Then I thought about childhood. And I thought about David Kleeman’s mantra, “Child development doesn’t change - its context does.” While this is a new set of challenges for adults, and is greatly affecting how we think about and plan for our daily and long-term needs - for kids, it’s just a lot of stuff that they sometimes think about but most of the time forget. The context of child development feels so much different than it did when I was a kid or when my parents were kids - but the actual progression through child development stages, remains unchanged.

Kids are resilient, kids learn quickly, and regardless of what’s happening in the world around them, they will remember to wash their hands when they are developmentally ready to do so - corona or not.

What does pretend play look like post-Coronavirus crisis?

Pretend play is always contextual. Kids naturally imitate and make play from the things that they see around them. When I was studying how kids create video at Toca TV, kids as young as as 4 years old would, unprompted, start their videos with “Hi guys” and end them with a finger point down and the word “Subscribe!” like they had seen all of their favorite YouTubers do. When I was a teacher in the Gambia, I saw toddlers pick up sticks and pretend to sweep the compound like they saw their moms do, or wrap cloths around their bodies to pretend to carry their babies. Kids play school and kitchen and Frozen, because that’s what they see.

One of my coworkers, in a channel dedicated to how we are all individually dealing with our particular brand of Corona struggles, shared a picture her daughter drew of what she is seeing her mom do day in, day out. She folded a piece of paper in half. On the tap half she drew two smiling faces. On the bottom half, she drew her version of a keyboard, with two emoji keys and a tetris-style array of other buttons. When asked what she was drawing, she said it was her and mommy on a Zoom call.

Suddenly, the mystery of what mom and dad do when they leave for work for the day is gone. The mundane meetings, spreadsheets, and paperwork are becoming something to emulate and play with.

Just like husbands and wives are learning about the work-place personas of their partners (we’ve all seen the “let’s circle back” tweet), so to are kids being given even more examples of what it means to be a grown up.

Media companies are leaning into this new normal as well. Sesame Street has risen quickly to the occasion, recording and releasing a segment called “Elmo’s Playdate”, where all the normal kind of play that Elmo and his friends takes part in is done via a Zoom call, complete with the klutzy Grover somehow flipping his camera upside down and consistently muting himself. (Notice the similarities between Grover in that segment and my own father on a recent family Zoom call… you can always count on Sesame Street to really capture the true family experience).

Kids will always pretend play, and will always attach their particular brand of creativity to what they see the people or role models around them doing. As time spent indoors, in the presence of their parents, continues to grow, I imagine that kids will learn and be exposed to habits their parents exhibit like never before. I imagine kids holding board meetings, kids giving feedback to high performing employees, and yes, even kids announcing in that adorable kid lisp “Let’s circle back next week.”

100 Miles of Product Thinking

In the home stretch of my time working as a Product Manager at ESPN, I spent all of my non-working time looking for jobs that would excite, inspire, and align more with my personal goals and interests. I wrote this as my creative application for a particularly enticing opportunity. I didn’t get the job, but I’m pretty proud of this piece. So here it is. I removed some of the more sales-y bits, because that’s embarrassing.

West Haven, CT - Prototyping

I started my trek in New Haven, CT.  New Haven is a coastal town in Connecticut, and it was a sunny day at 6am.  I left wearing a shimmery golden windbreaker, ready for a few hours of windy coastal biking before I would need to hop off for my first break.  

A mere six miles later, I crossed a bridge into West Haven and was given my first view of the Long Island sound.  The early morning fog was still floating above the water, the sun was low in the sky, and the only waves on the water were caused by the wind coming from the ocean.

As I crossed the bridge, I thought about stopping to take a picture of the scene I was viewing.  I thought it was beautiful and magical and amazing, and I thought I should capture it.  And this is what made me think of my first design principle - the importance of prototyping.

I love a scrappy prototype.  I love the creativity that it takes to abstract an idea to its most basic, and to test it out before spending a lot of time making it final.  At Toca TV, I prided myself on using paper, playing cards, and Keynote Magic Move to make an activity to test with users that would produce meaningful results. At Toca Boca, one of our concepts was to create a video platform that used a Tinder swiping functionality to feed into our recommendation engine.  We tested this by creating a paper football type game with different thumbnails printed onto cardstock.  Turns out kids like the function, but don't understand its effect on their recommendations.  And so we scrapped the idea and moved on, before we did any major development work.

One of my least favorite things about ESPN is the fact that we focus on pixel perfect prototypes to convince executive leadership that our product ideas will be successful.  We spend hours and days and weeks on creating a high fidelity prototype, leading to unrealistic expectations, and a lack of resources to spend on actually researching with users.

What does this have to do with West Haven, you may ask?  I didn't stop to take a picture on that first bridge.  Instead, as I rode, I word-smithed the way in which I would describe it to someone.  Instead of spending time fumbling for my camera in my bike side bag, and taking an underwhelming picture, I used my time to continue my progress toward my final goal.  I did eventually stop in a better water-side park and take a picture of the scene.  Sure enough, it did not capture the scene as well as the words chosen to depict the scene.  A prototype needs to convey a message and test a hypothesis - it does not need to be a full representation of the final product.  Prototypes are stepping stones to get you to your final product - and whether this is a draft of a paper, a Keynote digital prototype, or a gamified version of a mechanic - they are valuable exactly because they are less than the final product.

Here's the underwhelming picture.  

Daily Calorie Burn Achieved at 10am - A Quantified Self

I am believer in New Years Resolutions. I like taking the artificial timeline of one year and iterating on myself.  For 2018, I wanted to be a more quantified person. Often, this is focused on health, weight management, and physical training.  Undoubtedly, some of those goals are true of me, but I also wanted to track some non-physical things.  Without writing down everything that I do, I do my best to keep track of other things too - how much am I spending per week on coffee? How many different friends do I text per week? Am I more likely to finish a book if it's from the library or if I own it?

At around 10 am, as I passed through Norwalk, CT, I passed my daily calorie burn goal.  This brought to mind how I deal with data as I develop, design, and create learning materials and digital products. Just like I do as a product designer with the features implemented in my products, I have a set of events that I track to draw conclusions about my personal performance and progress.

This new-found focus on quantifying things has obviously led to increased awareness of where my time, calories, and money is spent.  But it has also improved my strategic thinking, my analytical understanding, and my creative problem solving on how to answer a question without the exact statistics I may want.

Beyond my thought processes, this practice has also improved my organizational systems and skills.  In order to track all of this data, I have to develop systems and processes for both gathering, organizing, and deciphering the data.  These improving skills in data analysis and data organization will help me to better track the success of a learning platform, and the ways in which we can iterate upon it.

In all of the skills mentioned as part of the Global Learning and Development Program and Experience Specialist, I will be a valuable addition to the team, bringing a fresh way of looking at and manipulating data, and an organizational system that meets the data being tracked and the question being answered. As a detail-oriented person, I will be diligent and successful in organizing calendars, managing budgets, meeting deadlines, and managing the details that go into large-scale events.

Welcome to New York - Delight!

56.5 miles into my ride, I crossed into New York, and heard the most delightful four words come through my headphones - "Welcome to New York".  A relatively new feature to Google Maps, every time you cross a state line, the app gives you a message ushering you into a new state, and also gives you a little icon that gives you a glimpse into the history and major characteristics of the state to which you are entering.  It's a small feature, I'm sure it's only a few line of codes, but rarely have I been as delighted to hear a digital voice welcome me to a new state.

My goal in any product, learning experience, or social experience is a moment of delight. That moment where the user may not directly think the thought, but has an awareness that whoever designed the product, designed it for them specifically.  Designers can foresee a user action and put an interaction there to reinforce it.

My first example of delight for delight's sake was when I worked at Tinybop.  I can't take credit for the feature, but on the overscroll in the menu, they inserted a little message to delight any user who tests the limits of the user interface.  It is delightful and magic, and anyone who has ever found it is undoubtedly delighted by it.

As I moved on to Toca Boca and worked on Toca TV, I tried to do the same thing, to delight users with unexpected interactions, silly movements, or surprising options that delight users.

The Bronx - MVP

Before starting my trip, I established what my MVP would be - my Minimum Viable Place.  If I could bike all the way to Bronx and get on a train for the remainder of the trip, I would be satisfied.  The minimum distance that I could go and still consider it a success was to the closest train in the Bronx.

Defining success at the outset of defining a product's scope is vital to meeting those goals. Similarly, defining what is to be mastered by the end of a course, a lesson, or a unit is also vital to making sure that users succeed.

As a teacher, or an educational game designer, I usually started with the objectives that I wanted to teach.  From there, the next step was to write the assessment.  If you know exactly what a user is expected to know by the end of your curriculum or learning experience, you can better direct and design the learning flow to make sure you hit those points.

When I was in the Peace Corps in West Africa, we did a one-week long bike trek, where we biked across the country, teaching HIV/AIDS awareness to village schools along the way.  As a curriculum developer for this experience, it was vital that we define what we needed a user ot know before we started.  Due to differences in languages spoken, level of English, and age, we had to teach the topics of defition, transmission, and prevention in a number of different ways - verbally, through imagery, and through games or movement.  By covering these objectives three times, we were sure to cover and provide all levels of student with a high opportunity to gain mastery in the transmission and prevention of HIV/AIDS.

Of course, the MVP is just the minimum.  I had enough energy and enough heart to continue till the end.  And so I went on to my destination, on my own wheels.

Achieving Magic

I arrived at my destination, an apartment in Park Slope where I was dogsitting for the weekend, at about 7pm.  The distance ridden when I arrived was 96.1 miles.  And that is an infuriating number.  A normal number.  A non-magical number.

100 miles is magic.  That extra digit makes all the difference between an epic ride that few people do, and a pretty long ride.  I wanted to do 100 miles.  I wanted the magic.

As my final 3-4 miles, I biked around Prospect Park, the full route around which is 3.7 miles.  It was pretty poetic, finishing with a lap around that park I used to run around 4 times per week, in the borough which was my home for four years, and which I'm dying to go back to.

I was tired.  I was exhausted.  I was hungry and sore and quite dehydrated.  But I pushed myself close to the limit to achieve the magic.  And for every company that I work for and that I believe in, I will push myself to the very limit to make products, experiences, and teamwork magical.