MCG Youth
MCG Youth
Embedded Files
Fall 2025
Project Leads
Team Members
Sage Rohrbach
Team Members
Maisha Agarwal, Thilak Balaji Sharmila, Daniel Ho, Zoey Ji, Eunbean Lee, May Zhang, Emma Zhao
Context
MCG Youth is a non-profit organization that aims to inspire creativity, learning, and personal growth through the arts. They offer art classes in ceramics, design, digital arts and photography studios to public high school students in Pittsburgh at no cost.
How can we motivate young artists to maintain above 70-75% attendance at MCG Youth afterschool programs in a fun and supportive manner?
Solution Overview
A template for the creation of a physical art "yearbook" for students to share their work and commemorate their experience at MCG Youth's program, a discord bot to be appended to MCG Youth's existing channel to encourage student collaboration and art showcase, and an interactive critique system to facilitate discussion and constructive feedback.
Secondary Research
Literature Reviews
For our secondary research, we performed literature reviews to gain a deeper understanding of our problem space as explained by existing research papers, articles, stories, and posts.
Comparative Analysis
We also performed comparative analyses to gain insights from current tools and solutions that address a problem space similar to ours.
Primary Research
Expert Interviews with Internal Program Supervisor and Executive Director
Our primary research method involved interviewing MCG Youth program's internal program supervisor and executive director. These discussions helped us gain insights into general trends in student involvement in the program over the years as well as helped us more deeply understand the current standing of MCG Youth programs and the organization's goals for improvement.
Student Interviews
Additionally, we interviewed students in the current MCG Youth program studios directly. These conversations provided us with insights about the student's current motivations for attending studio regularly as well as how they believe the programs may be improved.
Surveys
In order to reach past members of MCG Youth programs, we shared surveys with both current and past program attendees. These surveys shared with us the general trends in student engagement over time as well as provided us with common explanations for the origin of lack of attendance.
Modeling
We synthesized our primary research and expert interviews to identify patterns and key insights through affinity diagramming.
Key Insights
Through our research and modelling we discovered 3 main guiding insights:
Insight 1: Social connections and bonds are a priority to students
Insight 2: Current communication systems are overwhelming and hard to learn
Insight 3: Student Retention was at 68% last year, which was a relatively good year- MCG Youth would like to see above 70-75%
Ideate
From our insights, we began to imagine possible solution directions
We performed the Crazy 8 ideation method, rapidly proposing solutions with the initial goal of quantity over quality
After reviewing many diverse and creative ideas, we graphed the proposed ideas on an Impact Matrix, visually graphing which solutions require the most effort and which produce the most effective results
Finally, we refined the most feasible and high-impact ideas according to their alignment with the initial insights we had identified
Build
After recieving feedback from our contact at MCG Youth on their preferred project directions from those we had identified as most feasible and highly impactful, we began to create low-fidelity, mid-fidelity, and high-fidelity prototypes. This included initial storyboards and sketches of yearbook templates, critique systems, and Discord design that grew into figma pages, printed and assembled critique cards, and a fully operational Discord bot.
Testing and Feedback
Using the mid-fidelity prototypes, we visited MCG Youth's site and tested students across all 4 studios using the Think Aloud method. In total, we tested 24 students.
After synthesizing the feedback, we iterated on our designs to align with common critiques, sticking points, and compliments from students
Next Steps
MCG Youth plans to implement our proposed solutions, for which we provided guided implementation steps
Yearbook Implementation
Students will fill out a google form that we have designed to input images and descriptions of their artwork, pictures of them with their friends, and any comments to commemorate their achievements and remember happy moments
The program superviser will place the text and images into the pre-designed templates
The program supervisor will print the templates and fold into a small booklet that can be distributed to the students
Students can decorate their book, sign each other's books, and share their experience with friends and family
Critique Card Implementation
A link to the pre-designed critique cards has been provided and each page can be printed by the program supervisor
The cards can be assembled by gluing front to back and laminating
The interactive system can be set up by placing cards around the room and allowing students to wander, share their work, and fill out each others' cards with feedback
Students can take a picture of the feedback they recieved and wipe off the dry erase marker feedback from their card for reuse in the future
Discord Bot Implementation
A bot invite link has been provided
The program supervisor will go to settings, click "integrations", under channels click "x", click "add channels" and choose in which channels they want this bot to be active
Once added, the bot can be used by using commands to create a new project and upload work
Once work is logged on, it will automatically populate onto the associated website for everyone to access
Reflections
One thing we learned from working with MCG is the importance of receiving many perspectives. It was essential that we test multiple students in each of all four studios and consider their feedback individually, as different students had different thoughts. By combining the most common responses from students, we were able to create a solution that would be most impactful for everyone
Additionally, we learned that the importance of keeping our project goals and motivations in mind throughout the design process. We had to switch ideas, reconsider design choices, and constantly iterate on our project in order to create a solution that would be effective considering our users' wants and needs
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