Executive Summary

The Dartmouth Outdoors Club (DOC) has been a cornerstone of Dartmouth since its inception in 1909. While the DOC outdoor resources are extensive, they are currently underused by students and faculty alike. This occurs for a variety of reasons including social barriers to entry, bureaucratic impasses, beginner intimidation, and time constraints. Given this information, we set out to create a platform that would integrate student’s experiences in the classroom with those in the outdoors. Our platform allows any professor to book DOC cabins for experiential learning excursions, and provides the infrastructure for professors and students to interact and coordinate necessary trip details. Increasing the prevalence of academic immersion in the outdoors will address the white space that currently exists between the outdoors' potential for experiential learning and the amount of students using DOC resources.

My contribution was mainly in the creation of the design of the platform and the storyboarding of the experience in the outdoors after using it. I was also involved in user research by conducting up to 20 interviews, participating to DOC meetings and talking to valuable stakeholders such as professors and students.

More about our group's methods here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1QjWBuIbEjO8WQmPqxnd6_DzDK5sDgzz9YJQ3WKEGjR0/edit?usp=sharing