Agile for Kids, literally

The word Kids in the title is literal: kids! I have kids at home and nowadays they are required to study from home due to the current circumstances (the pandemic, obviously), the same way as I am also forced to work from home. Initially, they were kind of very happy about having not to go to school, but after the first week, I noticed that things started to change. Things were getting out of their control. They started to become desperate for not knowing exactly what to do. Lots of homework, online tests, and other activities. Now, their responsibility is way bigger than before, when they were present at school and teachers usually say to you what to do and when.

That's where I came in. So I was aware that I had to wear the hat of "Scrum Master" at home. So I decided to apply some agile methodologies which we use in the company to facilitate their lives, to give them focus on what's really important. I bought one whiteboard per daughter and colored paper stickers. Each color represents a type of activity: yellow for tests, pink for homework, and blue for other activities, for example.

Then we created a board with all stories which we identified together in a sort of light planning session. We identified the important stories for the week and glued all of them to the TODO session.

These were the sessions of their Kanban boards:

1. Backlog: all remaining stories
2. To do: starts with all the important stories for the week
3. Doing: the story which she is working on (should be only one)
4. Done: all completed stories

Now they know exactly what to do and they are way more confident knowing that everything is there on the board and under control.