Holodomor lesson wins international Education and Training Content interactive design award
Forge Media + Design received the Golden A’ Design Award in the Education and Training Content Design Category 2016–2017 from the International Design Academy for their Holodomor Mobile Classroom Immersive Learning Experience of the National Holodomor Awareness Tour (a Canada Ukraine Foundation project).
Valentina Kuryliw, author of “The Historian’s Craft” lesson whose content generated the design award, used an interactive methodology to have students analyze six different historical artifacts (documents, photographs, letters, survivor accounts and newspaper articles) to recreate a narrative in their own words of what actually happened during the Holodomor using these resources.
Forge worked on creating an application using these artifacts, which allows students to interact with each other in small groups with different roles and then teach the other student groups about the specific artifacts they were assigned. Kuryliw challenged Forge to not only make the software interactive across multiple iPads, but to also pioneer the software to transfer the students’ results onto the 12 large Samsung viewing screens that run down one interior side of the bus, so that everyone sees these immediately upon presentation. Apple Canada told Forge that this has never been done before. Forge made it happen.