Culinity

Learn Smarter, Not Harder

During the making of Culinity, I acted as Team Lead to oversee the project and connect our team with our teacher to make sure we were meeting the expected benchmarks. — During the making of Culinity, **I acted as Team Lead** to oversee the project and connect our team with our teacher to make sure we were meeting the expected benchmarks.

From educational policies that slashed the budget of Family and Consumer Sciences (Home Ec) classes to Millennials reliance on technology, there are many reasons outside of the younger generations control that prevent them from learning important kitchen skills.

Our team took an in depth look at what caused a generational gap in knowledge, and created Culinity to bridge the ever expanding divide between Millennials, younger generations, and the kitchen.

They never learned how to cook, and it was simply because they weren’t taught how to.

In 2012, there were only 3.5 million students enrolled in Family and Consumer Science classes (previously known as Home Ec.) which is a decrease of almost 40% in a decade. Following the testing policies of the No Child Left Behind act, America soon found that the budget for classes that taught practical, hands on skills that couldn’t be fit into a standardized test simply no longer existed like they used to. As we decrease our ability to teach these skills, shockingly, we find that we teach them less and students never learn. This is causing a direct blow to younger generations ability to cook among other life skills.

Current technology is hindering learning capability.

When Millennials go to the kitchen to cook, they start by turning to their phones for the answers they’re looking for. More often than not, this means Google. When this is their first course of action, it causes a phenomenon known as Cognitive Offloading.

Cognitive Offloading, simply put, is anything that we do to relieve some of the stress on our brain’s internal memory storage. Cognitive Offloading makes things take up less space in our brain, and when this happens too much, it hinders learning.

“Offloading robs you of the opportunity to develop the long-term knowledge structures that help you make creative connections, have novel insights and deepen your knowledge.” - Benjamin Storm, PhD

Explicit vs. Implicit

If we don’t learn lessons from the mistakes of the past, then we are doomed to repeat those failures. That’s why when we were learning about learning, we turned to a field called **Instructional Design.** Instructional Design is the field of using technology to teach people, and in order to truly teach younger generations to cook, it was important that we focused on imparting lessons that spurred deeper understanding.
**Explicit knowledge** is information that’s easy to convey. “St. Louis is a city in Missouri” is explicit information.
**Implicit knowledge** is information that must be gained by doing or experiencing. I can tell you, step by step, how you should ride a bike. However, none of that teaches you how to actually balance on one, or what it feels like to successfully ride a bike. This is implicit knowledge.
Implicit knowledge is the foundation of true understanding, and thus, independence in the kitchen. This is where online recipes fail to connect with users, and where we would have to step up our game when designing our teaching solutions.

Our Process

After we identified the problems, researched possible solutions, and drafted a formal timeline, it was time for us to get to work. We conducted 11 interviews, observed subjects within our targeted age range attempting to cook, and then we ideated some more.

From these interviews, we affinitized data, created our initial concept pitches, and created archetypes/personas.