What We Do > Design and Development
We help our partners realize their educational visions in a variety of media. We conceptualize educational tools and provide the expertise to turn ideas into working prototypes, from learning games to video-based professional development tools. Our design work encompasses more than just product development; it often shapes implementation strategies, intervention goals, and expectations, and feeds back into the research community’s understanding of larger questions.
Here's a description of one well-known design and development project.
Zoom In was originally a three-year project, funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, to create, test, and scale a suite of digital tools to help teachers develop effective instructional routines and their own curricular resources for teaching middle-school social studies and history with primary sources. Now, with additional funding from the National Science Foundation, Zoom In is being expanded to include a focus on science and data literacy.
Zoom In Tools for Teaching Literacy in the Social Studies is a set of digital tools that support social studies teachers in aligning their teaching with the Common Core Literacy Standards. The focus of the project was the development of a set of interactive analysis tools that teachers can use to help students develop habits of reading and writing, using evidence from primary and secondary sources.Zoom In can help social studies teachers learn how to read complex texts for evidence and perspective, how to anticipate and address the reading challenges their students will face, and how to lead sustained, focused discussions of challenging texts in the social studies classroom. For the social studies tools, EDC|CCT partnered with the American Social History Project (ASHP) as content and pedagogy developers, and with Blenderbox as designers and technology developers.
