Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia | 2016
Global Startup Labs Mongolia was a technology-based entrepreneurship course in Ulaanbaatar for high school and university students, which was collaboratively among three MIT graduate students. During the 10-week course to create mobile application startups, James led content on problem and asset identification, user engagement, interview strategies, survey design, branding strategies, and user-interface design.
Faced with a difficult language barrier, the approach to teaching and communicating changed each day as the student’s needs shifted. A curriculum that was previously taught predominately through lectures was quickly transformed to interactive games, hands-on design activities, rapid prototyping sessions, and one-on-one conversations in order to guide the students with more engaging forms of interaction.
The user-interface design content was structured around a series of user tests to simulate typical customer profiles, and how the design could be both creative and functional.
Almost all education content in Mongolia is delivered through lecture format. Instead of a lecture-centric curriculum, we designed the course around creative learning methods, such as brainstorming games.
In preparation for the final pitch day event, each team prepared a marketing package that focused on communicating company and brand identity.
Collaborators: Beth Hadley, Thanh Le
Partner Organizations: MIT MISTI, Mongolian University of Science and Technology, National University of Mongolia