Part of my job at Tivix is to stay on top of the latest applications of technology in different sectors. On Friday morning I had the opportunity to be a reviewer of the final Master’s projects last Friday in the Learning, Technology, and Design (LTD) program at Stanford University. 

The LTD program is one of my favorites at Stanford – students use Design Thinking principles to develop technology products for education. It could be for traditional K-12 classrooms, or it could be to help young people and their communities to develop and learn in other ways, outside the classroom. 

Students in the LTD program begin with a problem to be solved, and then use the Design Thinking framework to interview potential users, come up with a potential solution, build a digital MVP, and then rapidly iterate upon it and make refinements. 

There were 14 great projects from this year’s LDT cohort, but I’ll just mention here the three that I was a reviewer for:

• Candid is a mobile/tablet application that leverages popular media and interactive question prompts to foster meaningful sex education conversations between parents and their kids. Having “the conversation” has been difficult for many generations, and today of course kids are exposed to all kinds of stuff online and on TV at a much younger age. These two students, Aliza Hoffman & Kimiya Hojjat, interviewed parents and kids about what things could be done to make these conversations more effective, and developed a technology platform to deliver a way of facilitating better, more meaningful conversations. 
• Huddle addresses the problem of depression and suicidal ideation amongst undergraduate college students. For many kids, that first experience being away from home and under academic/social pressure can be very difficult. And the first place they turn is to their peers, who don’t have any of the training of a mental health professional. Huddle is an application platform for undergraduates to work with their dorm-mates to develop a supportive community and respond to such issues in a productive, proactive way. The student, Sonia Doshi, did a terrific job with developing the application concept. 
• MyHood was developed by two LTD students, Fabio Campos & Leiny Garcia, who grew up near underserved communities in Rio de Janeiro, and Los Angeles, respectively. From these geographically-disparate communities they saw several common threads, including the fact that adolescent youth in underserved communities have a low sense of empowerment and agency, and lack of academic relevance that deters them from active engagement. Fabio and Leiny developed a geo-location based application that uses gamification to learn what they can do for their neighborhood together. 

Really great stuff. You can see the list of all 14 projects here. Congrats to the whole cohort. 

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Photo by Tamarcus Brown on Unsplash