The student desk has been the sidekick to every student. The setting for many adventures, the repository for all found curiosities, and the playground for made up games. The Desk is an object that reflects self learning and the object on which we carved our story.

Quest Alliance is a non-profit committed to empowering young people with 21st century skills by enabling self-learning. They work with government schools to create joyful learning spaces, and vocational training institutes to enable young people to connect with the right careers and achieve their dreams.

I led the design and development of The Experience Desk—an installation that recounts the stories of learners, teachers and facilitators that Quest Alliance has helped through their initiatives. The Experience Desk was showcased at the Quest2Learn Summit, and is now being developed into a tangible learning tool for children.

The Desk tells the story of three characters and their tools—the Yellow Learner, Green Teacher, Blue Facilitator, and Orange Toolkit. The story is set in school and in the Vocation Training Institute. By interacting with the characters and their various combinations, we learn about how they learn and how their relationships impact each other. 

Interaction and Construction

The Desk has four slots of different shapes in which the characters would sit to activate their stories. Different combinations bring up stories highlighting their relationships. A crank on the side is used to operate and explore the narratives. Inspired by Indian travelling sound and lights shows, we designed The Desk to be dismantle-able from the legs for transportation across venues, where the desk was shown.

The front end was built on HTML and each character had a separate HTML page. A local Node.js server in the raspberry pi picked up the unique inputs from the Arduino and LEDs and chose which HTML pages to display. The crank inputs were also controlled similarly.

The Desk housed an Adruino controlling IR Led Diodes for each character. The Arduino and a rotary mechanism for the crank were connected to a raspberry pi. Space for a pico projector, and a compartment for storing the characters was also provided.

TEAM:

Ashis Panday
Shreya Garg

Exhibitions:

Quest2Learn Summit
National Institute of Advanced Sciences, Bangalore