Filling a hole in school curriculum by a gamified learning experience
Designing an e-learning app for secondary schools focused on teaching students media literacy and critical thinking through a gamified learning experience, which effectively solves the problem of lack of teaching materials and time for methodologic preparation, and enables teachers to include the topic seamlessly.
Field
Product Design
Client
Ministry of Investment, Regional Development and Informatics of the Slovak Republic.
Problem definition
Slovak education system relies heavily on memorization, lacking 21st-century skills, such as Critical Thinking or Digital Literacy in its state-mandated curriculum. The poor quality is also reflected on PISA scores, with Slovakia’s results being the way below OECD average. While a comprehensive curriculum reform is underway, there's a need for quick and simple, yet impactful solutions - and that is exactly what our app Infomat strives to be.
💡 The problem we set out to solve
How might we help high school teachers to seamlessly include Critical Thinking and Media Literacy in their teaching plans?
Our goal is to allow teachers to integrate Critical Thinking and Media Literacy within the regular curriculum of school subjects by offering full methodical coverage of the topics, so that the teacher can just take the app and use it right away without any friction or need to prepare anything special for the lessons.
Created by experts from Slovak Debating Association, our curriculum is tailor-made to align with the Slovak High School curriculum, with each topic being an extension of regular topics within subjects Mathematics, Slovak Language, Social Studies, and Arts & Cultures, thus achieving continuity and seamless integration of Critical Thinking and Media Literacy.
The Design Process
Research and product specification
As we were already well-aware of the situation in Slovak schools and the absence of innovation was clear, we focused our research on the target personas - teachers and students, to tailor our solution to their specific needs.
Our personas reflect 2 opposite sides of spectrum - on one side, we have motivated individuals passionate about learning, on the other, there are people who have already given up on Slovak education system and only want to somehow get though.
Our goal is to allow teachers to integrate Critical Thinking and Media Literacy within the regular curriculum of school subjects by offering full methodical coverage of the topics, so that the teacher can just take the app and use it right away without any friction or need to prepare anything special for the lessons.
Created by experts from Slovak Debating Association, our curriculum is tailor-made to align with the Slovak High School curriculum, with each topic being an extension of regular topics within subjects Mathematics, Slovak Language, Social Studies, and Arts & Cultures, thus achieving continuity and seamless integration of Critical Thinking and Media Literacy.
💡 The problem we set out to solve
How might we help high school teachers to seamlessly include Critical Thinking and Media Literacy in their teaching plans?
Based on our knowledge of the personas and school environment, as well as the structure of similar learning apps, we created a list of requirements and features for our MVP product:
💡 Our Minimal Viable Product (Condensed)
BASIC REQUIREMENTS
Teachers would like to not only assign modules, but also have a discussion with students about a topic, or be able to attach additional materials.
As many teachers are not technically literate and have trouble with adapting new softwares, the app needed to be simple and resemble the softwares they already use (Edupage, Google Classroom).
Teachers have little spare time, adoption needs to be smooth and fast, ideally it should take between 10-15 minutes to understand and set up the app and assign students the first topic
The app should be accessible via web, but also downloadable as students prefer the latter.
FEATURES
The app should deliver ready-to-use modules for the teacher, have automatic grading and progress tracking, a discussion forum and space for additional learning materials.
Allow teacher to see their student’s progress, monitor behaviour in discussion channels, and individually praise students for good work.
Have option for teachers to change the order of topics within the curriculum or skip some.
As there are sometimes multiple teachers teaching the same subject, or one teacher teaching multiple classes, the app should allow teachers to switch between and manage multiple classes.
SPECIAL CONSIDERATIONS
As teenagers are a very specific group, oftentimes hard to motivate, we needed to consult and test our gamification features to ensure we achieve the desired motivational effects.
Students are sensible to their grades and scores, especially when facing hardship or failure, so our app needs to stay motivational and encourage students even in case of a bad results.
Based on that, we created simple user flows in forms of charts and wireframes that served me as a starting point for further design.
The final structure of student and teacher interface, based on our low-fidelity exploration earlier:
Rounds of ideation, iteration and testing
My design process encompassed rounds of ideation, design, feedback and testing, and iteration. We divided testing into sections - with different classes of high schoolers from Secondary School of Mechanical engineering in Bratislava, we were separately testing all 5 parts of the app, gathering qualitative but also quantitative feedback. Simultaneously, the app and our progress was oversaw and reviewed by officers and technical experts from the Ministry.
I started by designing the core features of the app, creating the least used sections as last. Started with mobile version of student interface, followed by its desktop equivalent, then used components in student’s interface to create teacher interface and then lastly, license admin management section.
Building the app gradually in chunks (Home Screen, Weekly Challenge, Discussion Forum, Educational Materials, Profile, User Management), I followed a simple process for all parts:
Design system
To make file management and development easier, I was simultaneously building and editing design system of our app, and in case of more complex designs, such as an interactive roadmap, provided the developers with ready-to-implement building blocks.
Gamification elements
After rounds of research, our app ended with these gamification elements, approved by our test groups of highschoolers:
Result
Reflecting on the fulfilled Minimal Viable Product Criteria we set at the beginning, combined with positive feedback we got through user research, our app should significantly lower the effort teacher will have to make in order to introduce Critical Thinking and Media Literacy into their teaching plans. Here are the key features our app offers to teachers and students:
1. Curriculum presented interactively
Students learn through Weekly challenges featuring short explanational sections combined with practical exercices.
2. Additional materials
Students who want to learn more than what the standard curriculum offers have the resources to do so, with links to educational materials, as well as projects and competitions to join.
3. Progress tracking and motivation
Students can easily see their progress and compete with classmates.
4. Discussion feature
Students can engage in discussion about the presented topics with the teacher and classmates, earn bonus points, a practice newly gained argumentation skills.
