When the pandemic hit, all things including schools transitioned online. K-12 school students were particularly affected as they struggled to transition to remote learning. We decided to look deeper into the issue and design an experience that could be as engaging as in person school.
🎯 Turning this project into reality as a student entrepreneur at The Shoebox Incubator Center at Indiana University.
12 weeks
(Oct '20 - Dec '20)
Figma
Miro
Procreate
User Research
Brand identity
Visual Design
Interaction Design
Prototyping
Parumita Sachdeva
Fatima Rafiqui
How might we provide a more engaging & fun virtual learning experience for K-12 students affected by the pandemic?
Students can quickly track their progress, see how much they've built their castle and even customize their castles! Students can also add top friends in the dashboard to see their progress and have a friendly competition!
To make the one way online classroom communication more engaging teachers can launch preset quiz questions related to the lecture. This will keep the kids engaged and excited to earn points which will help them build their castle.
Students can earn points and badges as they make progress, which ultimately contribute towards building a piece of the castle! They can also maintain streaks and track their attendance through the profile section.
Teachers and students can experience 360 virtual tours together and can react and comment on their experiences in real time!
Visualizing progress has never been so fun. Kids can earn points through engagement and interaction which will help them complete their castle gradually!
The first impression is often said to prevail. A fun onboarding session to give a sneak peek at the platform will motivate the exploratory nerve for young minds.
We started looking into this space through online mediums and observing what the learning experience looked like. We thought the problems were mainly:
1. Lack of discipline
2. More distractions which ultimately led to lesser concentration
3. Lack of self-motivation
4. Lack of extracurricular activities
We observed a virtual classroom session via Zoom video conferencing.
We talked to 5 middle school children who were doing remote school through tools like Zoom, Microsoft Teams &Â Canvas.
The social needs weren’t fulfilled: Kids miss their friends.
“School used to be so fun! I used to enjoy a lot with my friends and knowing what they are up to”
Students need personal attention and a need for  self-expression
“I really miss my Karate & Swimming classes, it’s not the same online”
Low engagement with online platforms results in low attention span.
“Usually, I just shut my video and eat breakfast during class, many students do that”
The insights generated from the  interviews guided us in evaluating the existing products against the metrics that came up frequently.
Although Classcraft seemed promising as it had gamified the complete learning experience it lacked the balance of academic learning and felt too overwhelming.
“I like Hay Day because you can customize your farm the way you like and make it look beautiful, and it’s easy to play too!”
“I like that I can atleast chat with my friends on personal chat on Zoom. We also do Zoom calls to work together.”
We started ideating by making some low fidelity sketches. This was mainly done to get some initial feedback.
We took feedback from 10 people of different age groups and experience.
We realized our designs weren’t tying back to our principles.
01..
How might we fulfill the social needs of children to help promote a more holistic growth & learning?
02.
How might we cultivate engagement among middle schoolers to facilitate a better learning experience?
03.
How might we encourage self-expression to provide a more personalized learning environment?
How might we cultivate engagement among middle schoolers to facilitate a better learning experience?
How might we encourage self-expression to provide a more personalized learning environment?
We wanted to make sure we choose features with high reward and low effort to begin with. We asked kids to rate their favorite features and discussed the engineering efforts with a few developers to move forward with our final design decisions.
Based on our design principles, and the feature prioritization we built our information architecure with a dashboard for quick access to highlighted features and a vertical navigation to jump to other categories.
We wanted our brand to be playful, inviting and fun, so we tried to achieve that through bright colors, friendly fonts and rounded corners in the UI and layout. The UI has a lot of whitespace and breathing room to feel more welcoming and calm.
Alexandra can see her upcoming classes, assignments and activities on the dashboard. She can also see her own progress and customize her castle the way she likes.
Alexandra can personalize her profile by adding avatars and pictures. She can also set status, track her awards and attendance streak as well as view what her friends’ profiles look like.
Alexandra and her classmates can do class activities like visiting the virtual museum of Anne Frank. This can enable a more engaged and fun learning environment.
"I love the dark theme mode, It is so cool makes me want to use the app right away!” - 16 year old
“WOW! This is so much better than a Teams! The Rapunzel Castle is the best one.” -12 year old
“Your product looks very promising and is very much implementable. If I had time, I would have loved to develop it” - Software Engineer, Amazon
When so many products already exist in the market, it became essential to question our idea at every stage and determining what are the unique things we are bringing to the table.
The scope of the product kept on increasing and we found ourselves overwhelmed. Only after narrowing our focus to the primary persona and key distinguishing ideas, we were able to move forward.
Interviewing and recruiting kids was challenging. Planning activities to understand their behaviour in a subtle way was our major challenge in the research phase.
