{"id":25759,"date":"2020-07-14T03:24:46","date_gmt":"2020-07-14T03:24:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.challengedetroit.org\/?p=25759"},"modified":"2020-07-14T03:24:46","modified_gmt":"2020-07-14T03:24:46","slug":"from-the-eastside-to-the-east-coast-ivys-getting-detroit-students-to-college","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.challengedetroit.org\/blog\/from-the-eastside-to-the-east-coast-ivys-getting-detroit-students-to-college\/","title":{"rendered":"From the Eastside to the East Coast Ivy\u2019s – Getting Detroit Students to College"},"content":{"rendered":"

Challenge #5 with Midnight Golf Program (MDP)<\/h2>\n

The last Midnight Golf cohort before COVID19 hit. MGP has been able to transition to virtual programming but it hasn\u2019t nearly been the same! <\/span>After beginning the year working with Detroit Public Schools Community District and their amazing students, I can\u2019t help but feel like my time and work in this fellowship has come full circle by completing Challenge Project #5 with Detroit\u2019s Midnight Golf Program. If you haven\u2019t heard, MGP has played a critical role in assisting metro Detroit students become college-bound for the last 16 years using methodology for student change rooted in research-based theories. With intense life-skills training, proactive coaching, long-term mentoring and the game of golf, MGP has increased the rate of their students graduating college by 40%, and keeps a steady rate of 98% of participants attending college.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

When teaming up with Midnight Golf\u2019s ambitious Executive Director,\u00a0 Dave Gamlin, he already had a pretty clear vision about what we needed to do in order to bring MGP mission into the 21st century – We needed to make a mobile app. This app would help students create the perfect schedule, have a library of helpful life skill resources, encourage healthy behaviors and have a community function. This would bring the MGP experience to more students than we could ever imagine the program currently reaching on it\u2019s own and change the landscape of how students navigate college forever. Hah, no big deal or anything right? I guess we\u2019d be up for the Challenge…<\/span><\/p>\n

Now I have to say, Jordan and I did some WORK. We started the project by digging up all the background research we could – what apps were already out there? What does our competition look like? What is the science behind why these apps work? What kind of functionality is possible? What are the best ways for students to study? How do you even develop a mobile app?! Whew, there was so much to learn!\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

For our interviews, Dave gave us the opportunity to meet with a variety of stakeholders from MGP, including current students, alumni, mentors, and even someone from a foundation that supports MGP\u2019s work. While we felt good about the work so far, the team decided we needed to narrow it down to focus on the most important functionality of the app (otherwise we were trying to create a super app and that just wasn\u2019t viable!). I was able to include in an idea I\u2019ve wanted to do for this entire fellowship – distribute a survey to the desired users – and guess what! We got 128 responses from alumni of MGP! This felt like the exact direction we needed because we were able to collect clear data on what these students needed assistance with at college. Through the survey, we identified that building better study habits, focusing while studying and time management all were tied at 50% that respondents said they needed the most help with.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

In the end, Jordan and I created what we called the <\/span>App Development Guide,<\/b> that consisted of a <\/span>Lifestyle Management Quiz<\/b> that would help calculate a students perfect schedule, including their classes and when to study. We used the <\/span>background research to provide recommendations<\/b> on how to create the schedule algorithm, focusing on proven study habits and asking them personal questions about their social life, extracurriculars and health habits. The data from the <\/span>MGP App Target User Assessment<\/b> informs the <\/span>App Iteration Guide <\/b>because it was used to identify the needs of our target users and their priorities, like what are they most concerned about? (getting good grades was #1, family #2), and what features would they absolutely need integrated? (email for sure). The Iteration Guide outlines the different updated versions and the added features we found critical for the app to mimic the work of the Midnight Golf Program. Lastly, we included a <\/span>Competition Research Guide<\/b> that compares all of the apps that are currently in the similar space. This outlines the pros and cons of each and uses those to create considerations for MGP’s app. This development guide was made understanding that there will be a team of mobile app developers who come up behind us to complete this work, so we wanted to create something that showed\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Overall, completing this project completely virtually was another layer to the Challenge I didn\u2019t expect, but I\u2019m thoroughly proud of the work we\u2019ve accomplished. All I keep thinking about is all the students we\u2019re going to be helping through creating a tool that allows them to reach their fullest potential.<\/span><\/p>\n

***<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Challenge #5 with Midnight Golf Program (MDP) The last Midnight Golf cohort before COVID19 hit. MGP has been able to transition to virtual programming but it hasn\u2019t nearly been the same! After beginning the year working with Detroit Public Schools Community District and their amazing students, I can\u2019t help but feel like my time and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":93,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14,26],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-25759","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-givedetroit","category-community"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.challengedetroit.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25759","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.challengedetroit.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.challengedetroit.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.challengedetroit.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/93"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.challengedetroit.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=25759"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.challengedetroit.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25759\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.challengedetroit.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=25759"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.challengedetroit.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=25759"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.challengedetroit.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=25759"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}