WHY WE THINK HANDILY IS A GOOD IDEA... 

Handily has firm academic roots in Stanford University. As such, it necessarily has high barriers to cross in validating itself as being based on sound design, educational, technological and business principles. Here is how we​ are ensuring that we confirm to those high standards.

User Validation

 

The Stanford Design School has drilled design thinking principles into us in an indelible way. Starting with the end user in mind, our empathy exercises included:



• Volunteering with a local non-profit to climb the roofs of low-income housing to install solar panels. Besides getting first-hand information on what learning these green collar jobs mean, we were also able to interview other solar technology newbies like us on site as well as their instructors. This was a pretty cool experience! 
• Attending a wind technician introductory course at UC Davis. Again, quite a few interviews with fellow students and our instructors followed.
• Running classroom user tests for the Handily prototype at another prominent non-profit that trains unemployed individuals for technician jobs. We spoke to several students and will be presenting a Handily product demo to their managing committee shortly.

Academic Validation

 

Since Handily is Aneeqa and Vipul's graduate project, it comes with a terrifyingly simple success metric - If it cannot stand up to the rigorous examination that Stanford's academics are no doubt going to put it through, Aneeqa and Vipul will not graduate and will then generally spend the rest of their lives in inglorious ignominy. As such, Handily has to be based on sound theory.



We have shared the Handily concept with several academics inside and outside Stanford University. Among others, these included long-time professors in the education and engineering schools, authorities on the topic of wind energy technology at UC Davis, and the director of a solar technician program at a Bay area community college. We are also soaking up substantial academic literature that has been validating some of the decisions we've made, including leveraging embodied learning. 

Quantitative Validation

 

We have tried to keep this exercise as grounded in hard data as we possibly could. Our user tests offered us a wealth of qualitative data that was obviously useful. However, we believe that it is the hard numbers that will really be the bedrock of credibility for Handily's effectiveness. With the game portion of this product just becoming available, we will be in a much better place to objectively test the efficacy (and the failings) of various aspects of Handily... and do something about it. Stay tuned!