05Key Findings

Pulling Out The Important Stuff

I had four key findings which each had golden nuggets of information that led me to my key insight. These four key findings were :

Children can only learn in their native language up until grade 3, whereafter they are forced to learn in English.
Due to bad domestic environments, there is no reading culture at home for a large majority of these children.
Classrooms have too many pupils crammed into them, making it hard for the educator to properly attend to each child.
Peer pressure and a stressed teacher make children scared to ask for help and this often leads to them lagging behind.
06Key Insight

The Human Truth

In essence, through my key findings that were previously mentioned, I found out that children in these classrooms were scared to ask for help; scared to be seen as not understanding the work and felt uncomfortable asking the teacher for help - a stressed teacher who has to cover the syllabus with over 50 children in his/her class. The pupils therefore just keep quiet and this leads to them slowly falling behind the rest of the class and not actually learning or progressing with their literacy skills.
Therefore the insight was :

Children learn better in a positive environment that makes them feel emotionally safe and valued.
07Target Audience

Who I Am Targeting

The next step was to define my target audience for my solution, with distinct target audience profiles.

Primary Target Audience
Teachers who teach children between grade 0 - 3, and attend school in peri-urban areas
Profile - Thuthuka

Thuthuka is a grade one teacher at Waterloo Primary School, and teaches a class of 50 children. She is very stressed and pushed for time in her class, trying to help as many children as possible, but cannot cope with the high number of pupils in her class and so often struggles to cover the syllabus.

Primary Target Consumer
Children between grade 0 - 3 who attend school in peri-urban areas
Sibonsio

Siboniso is a grade one pupil at the no-fee primary school in Waterloo. He is full of energy and happy to learn, but comes from a tough domestic enviroment where his parents, one a domestic worker and the other a gardener, are always away from home and do not have time to read books with him.

With my insight and target audience profiles set, I could then start working on ideating and prototyping a concept that would become the final solution to the problem.

See Ideation and Prototyping