Author: Olivia

This is the app prototype we developed.

It has a user friendly interface and offers basic features, for now, that centralise all services the club offers in one place.

Our attention is to at first really develop the ‘Events’ page and the ‘Transport’ page as these directly address our problem of transportation and attendance.

We hope to develop an accessible schedule that is full of events, such as basketball tournaments, that will attract kids into attending if they know what is going on at the club and when.

The second app is the transport app which will feature a system where a child can request a ride from their school up until 12noon the day of.

 

After presenting to Camille, she was really excited about our ideas of providing a new transportation service in the form of a bus, and developing an app that places all of The Boys and Girls Club services in one place.

As well as excitement, she did provide hesitation at the cost and implementation difficultly of such proposed ideas. What we then proceeded to explain is that the goal is to prioritise. The bus purchase is something that can be first on the list, and they are relatively inexpensive to purchase second hand in the area.

We then explained that apps at first seem daunting because you think of the words ‘coding’ and ‘expensive’ but we explained that there is a lot of relatively inexpensive software that does the work for you. This is also something that can done more long term and doesn’t need to be started right away. Notre Dame students and volunteers can also be enlisted to help with identifying ways to do this.

Overall, we think our ideas and vision carried well, and we hope some, if not all, are implemented in the future!

Thank you, Camille!

Individual Interview 1:

Anna, 14, St. Adam’s ‘Teen’

I asked Anna several questions regarding the Boys and Girls Club, and her knowledge of it. What we gathered from this interview is that she had no idea there was such a club and responded to my question of ‘so what do you think of the Boys and Girls Club’ with the answer “What’s that?”. This was interesting and provided us with a completely new insight which we hadn’t even considered – how many people know about it, as opposed to assuming everyone had heard of it in some capacity. More surprisingly is Anna is a South Bend native, her father drives past the club everyday and she has lived in South Bend her entire life – yet the club had never been brought to her attention.

 

Individual Interview 2:

Sam, 16, High school student and local cafe worker

Sam’s interview was insightful as it too provided a new, unthought of insight. He had a problem with the identification of the club, and the brand / views associated with it: “Boys and Girls Club sounds so young, like its for little kids or something.”. He identified that he wouldn’t attend the club because it sounded too like something for younger children, and wasn’t relevant to him or his friends. He said he expected little kids running around, not a place that him and his friends could ‘chill’ or ‘hang’. This was an unfortunate perspective because the club has really great facilities, especially the high quality indoor basketball court. When we made him aware of this he was surprised.

 

Expert Interview:

Camille, Club program leader

Our meeting with Camille highlighted the key problems she had witnessed from a staff members point of view. The two main areas that needed to be addressed were transportation and attendance. She stated that their isn’t a sufficient means of getting children from school to the club, ‘we used to have a bus that did an after school run to collect the kids, but we no longer have the bus. Now I just pick up what kids i can (usually 2-3 along with her children) and bring them here.” 

We expect that there is correlation between these two problems – insufficient transport services to the club has caused such a drop in attendance. We believe focusing on transportation will in turn help the attendance issue – at least significantly.

 

Immersion: Spend sometime at the club and immerse in the culture and activities.

To do this we visited the club from 5pm onwards and engaged in watching them play basketball, do their hw, and socialise with their friends. This offered insight into the types of activities that occurred at the club and what kids spent most of their time on.

 

Interactive: Pictures and Collage 

Whilst at the club, although we are unable to take pictures of the users, we were able to take pictures of the facilities and activities. From this we used them to create a college to come up with ideas on how to attract new users to build attendance.

We recognised some aspects captured really well and were the selling points of the club. The basketball court was one and the new Mac desktops were another. Both are great, new resources that are not offered at many other clubs, or homes.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Gallery day was very helpful in receiving feedback on our ideas from those who are most involved in the Boys & Girls Club. They had several comments on how we could best expand our research and ideas to better address the problem at hand.

The first was that they were really intrigued by our research with kids from South Bend who responded that they had ‘never heard of’ the Boys and Girls Club. With this, they asked how we could best target them. It was suggested that the two best ways to do this would be via social media, as they are very active online,  and to advertise at their schools.

Advertisements at school were ruled out because of the politics and lengthy process that accompanies trying to get something promotional in the schooling system.

Social media at first drew hesitations as their response was ‘we don’t have a marketing team, or the budget for one’. But after an explanation of you don’t actually have to have one, there will be simple posts from staff end, but most of the social activity will come from kids ‘sharing’ their times at the club when having fun, which is free advertising. This will initially come from the revised schedule seeing the introduction of more events and fun activities at the club, e.g. the basketball tournament.

 

The second piece of feedback we got was we had to explore the stakeholders and potential partners of the transportation issue. We addressed that something had to be done for transportation, and we recognised buying a bus would be the best thing to accommodate more children, however we were advised to look at the community. Do we want to buy a bus that is owned and operated by the Boys and Girls Club, do we want to partner with Transpo of South Bend to provide the service, etc?

 

This picture is actually a screenshot of a video, but here a boy, who does not have a running shower, needs to wash his hair. Equipped with just a bottle and a sink, he decides to fill a water bottle, strap it to his back and wash his hair by tipping forward over the sink and letting the water pour over his shampooed hair to wash it out.

With limited resources but needing to wash his hair, this is a very innovative concept that gets the job done!