LEARNING.COM

Tech Quest

THE GOAL

Offer a self-guided learning experience for students in K-12 education so students could effectively level up their digital literacy skills.

Statistically, digital literacy skills (or lack thereof) create long-lasting impacts for students throughout their educational and career journeys. Providing an easy way for schools to roll out curriculum aligned to tech standards was critical to the success of reaching digital literacy goals across the country. Additionally, the goal of student engagement was a key objective so that students would take ownership of their learning in a way that scaled across the district. Teachers are over-burdened in their daily tasks and simply can’t provide the personalization and 1:1 mentorship needed in order to keep all students moving at the same pace. The project aimed to solve this problem through adaptive learning and gamification to incentivize students.  

Timeline: 8 months

My Role: Product Design, User Research, Game Design Architecture, Front-End Development

Tools: Adobe CC, Sketch, Angular, Bootstrap, SCSS, HTML

UNDERSTANDING WHAT MOTIVATES STUDENTS

A main takeaway was allowing students to guide their own learning and leverage the platform in a way that made them want to return to the material in order to master concepts and skills.

I collaborated with product, development, customer support and sales to have a better understanding of how to increase student engagement and ease of implementation at the district, school, and teacher level. We identified several problems that were unique to each user role and needed a way to converge on a solution to address the multiple needs. Outcomes and long-term educational success was largely dependent on students being able to have foundational skills that would enable them to become digitally fluent in essential tools.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

• Earning stars (3/3) motivated them to want to master the lessons

• A self-guided path reduced planning time for teachers

• Themes and avatars helped make the UI/UX engaging and fun

IDEATION + TESTING (Round One)

We leaned heavily on game design principals and gamification in order to motivate students.

Through data analytics, user research and customer feedback, we learned that the game time earned in the Adaptive Keyboarding app (from Learning.com) was the top motivator for students. Building off of this success, we wanted to allow students to make learning fun, rewarding and delightful.

IDEATION + TESTING (Round 2)

Deep research was done to understand what themes, graphics, elements resonated with grades K-2, 3-5, 6-8, 9-12.

Due to the need of serving a wide gamut of development levels, I collaborated with the software architect to create a base framework that allows for reward systems, game time earned, and curriculum pathways to be served up for students of all ages. On top of that framework, we were able to build custom graphics, animations, behaviors that suited the needs of each demographic.