THE ACADEMY GROUP
Project Overview
A mobile app designed for students to complete online and real world activities throughout the duration of a six week program. It is centered on motivating student participation through the gamification of self-pace learning at home.
My Contributions
-
Research to establish key learning goals
-
Established design principles
-
Ran paper prototyping testing
-
Assisted in UI creation
-
Interactive Prototype in Axure (View Here)
Our Process
Who are our users?
Our design was specifically targeted for young students of 3rd and 4th grade levels. We structured the design in a way so as the student completes a year of the program, the interface and theme will change to suit their growth, while still maintaining the same structure.
​
Research
In the first step of our process, we established 10 external apps that would be the foundation of the students learning activities. These include; reading, math, typing, business, exercise, and coding.
We did this by researching Allan Collins criteria of Learning Goals and Tom Reeves Taxonomy in order to create a diverse and rich learning experience for the students.
​
View our interactive Analysis!
​
Design Principles
We developed insights based on the demographic of students that would be using this application. We created a list of design principles and decided that we needed to incorporate features such as:
-
Progress tracker
-
Reward system
-
Anonymous community view of activities other students have completed for motivation
​
Outcome
-
Includes a Classroom Game Board page, an Activities page, and a Profile page.
-
The classroom level puzzles are within the Classroom Board. Here students can view the progress of the category puzzles and also have an activity feed where they can see what kind of activities other students have completed.
-
The Activities page contains all individual level puzzels. Avatars of students are displayed in an anonymous way on the board to show the progress of everyone. The purpose in maintaining anonymous avatars is for students to focus on their own progress, not others. This serves as motivation for healthy competition, to track progress and foster a supportive environment among the students.
-
Below the game board are the individual category picture puzzles, where students can complete online and real world activities to unlock a part of the picture puzzle. There are constraints for these puzzles that only allow for students to complete a maximum of two activities per category for each week as well as prompts that suggest other categories for students to try.
