GamePlan
The only classroom you need.
Current online solutions for elementary level, lack a focus on education all-in-one place, deprive students of valuable social interactions and collaborative learning opportunities, and shift a home teacher role onto unprepared and busy parents.
GamePlan is an online learning environment that places the entire classroom experience in one place and streamlines communication through contextual messaging between parents, teachers, and students. It engages students through gamified lessons and collaborative learning which encourages social interaction and fun.
Role
My main role in this project was the Interaction Lead.
I worked on wireframing and designing the interactive prototype for the user's interface of the online classroom environment. I also worked on presentation layouts, the final process book and research.
Tools
Figma, Miro, Adobe CC & Google Suite
Duration
10 Weeks
Collaborators
Colleen Miller, Jasmin Attanasio, Kelly Pobgee, Leonardo Caballero & Max Poliseno
Indigo Design Awards 2021
2x Indigo Gold
5x Indigo Silver
3x Indigo Bronze
European Product Design Awards
Honorable Mention
Problem
Due to the pandemic, parents have unexpectedly had to take on the role of a teacher for their students at home and struggle to balance this new role with their busy lifestyle.
Tagret User
Primary: PreK – 5th grade teachers and students
Secondary: PreK – 5th grade parents
How Might We ...
· improve upon the social development and structure of the in-person education experience through online learning?
· create a system to balance the busy lifestyle of parents and the educational needs of their children?
· maintain a flexible educational environment that is easily adaptable?
· better facilitate a connection between parents and teachers?
· create a single, streamlined communication platform?
Inital topic of interest
Starting off the project we initally had a pool of topics we were interested in. Due to being at the beginning of the pandemic we decided to do further research on accessibiliy during a pandemic.
Topic of interest
After doing some secondary research we decided on focusing on Parents' role in online education and we wanted to dive deeper into this problem area.
UX Problem
We created a UX problem to be able to foucs our research on a specific pain area within our choosen problem space.
Secondary Research
Starting our secondary research, we found multiple case studies that support our hypothesis and showed us how much impact we can have in this problem space.
PreK-5th is a crucial time in children's educational and social development. At the time of the research (September 2020), we found out that 1.1 billion children worldwide are out of school due to COVID-19. We saw our opportunity to help is within those 27 million PreK-5th children being out of school at that time.
A case study from Levinson split Teacher, Parents, and Student online teaching into five different phases. The phases focus on either asynchronous or synchronous learning models, with non-communication and communication options and virtual re-teach sessions, office hours, and more. This study showed that in phase 3, parents and teachers seemed to find it more challenging to adjust to this phase. This was mainly caused due to the workload of virtual re-teaching sessions, language, and office hours to communicate with each other. The platforms used didn't help ease this process and gave both parties difficulty individualizing students' support.
An article from The Washington Post in which two work-from-home parents documented how often their two children interrupt them during their workday helped us realize how much-affected parents are from this situation. We visualized the interruptions and counted an average of 15 interruptions per hour. Thus, work-from-home parents' productivity decreases due to the high number of interruptions.
In a case study with over 21,000 parents surveyed, the most significant pain points we found supporting our problem space were that families who own a computer need more targeted communication. On the other side, families without a computer desire more communication in general.
In another study from Finnland, we found that effective two-way communications between parents and teachers are essential to building and maintaining a good partnership. According to this study, online classes don't help facilitate these essential communications and lead to both parties feeling unheard. A survey showed that digital communication supporting the feeling of making them being heard is only somewhat agreed on by both parents and teachers.
Secondary Research - Pain Points
Gathering together our secondary research insights to move on to our expected outcomes and primary research, the main unmet needs we found for parents' role in online education were:
Expected Outcomes
Before we started our primary research we defined a couple of outcomes that we expected to ease with our upcoming solution.
Research Objectives
Having defined our problem space and finding supporting data for our hypothesis, we came up with goals and problems for which we wanted to find answers with our primary research.
Primary Research - Survey
Starting our primary research, having our research objectives in mind, we created a survey and received 98 respondents. The age range of the participants was between 26 and 64 years old and included married and single individuals with children.
The survey results proved that parents have to take on the teacher role when their children are learning in an online-based environment. This also collides with half of the parents having increased communication since online classes started. Another significant insight is that 60% of the parents had to take over the role of the teacher by helping with their homework.
Primary Research - Interviews
We realized in order to design a solution for the parents we have to take the students and teacher into consideration as well. We conducted 14 user interviews, with 11 being married or single parents and three experts being teachers.
We asked the parents about their daily routine, technologies they use, adjustments they have made, and how the communication to the teachers is.
The Teachers had similar questions, some based on COVID-19 concerns, the communication towards parents, and online learning in general.
Parents evaluated the situation based on the mental model of on-ground school, saying the communication with teachers has either been strengthened or weakened depending on existing personal relationships with the teacher. We also saw the pattern of parents reporting on having to balance childcare during the work-from-home time.
Some of the teachers mentioned missing one-on-one time with the students to help them solve problems. Teachers try to replicate social and interactive factors essential for child development into their online teaching methods. The teachers also reported that the online environment requires more involvement in tracking the students' progress.
Affinitazition & Takeaways
After the research phase, we affinitized in Miro and had over 700 data points which we sorted down to 5 How Might We questions. Our takeaways from the research were:
· Parents are unfamiliar with how their children's online school is conducted
· Parents see a lack of focus and individualized experience compared to in-person education
· Parents struggle to balance communication with the teachers
· There is an overflow of platforms being used for online education
· In-person education is more conducive to their child's social development
· Parents struggle to balance their work with children's educational needs
The How Might We questions that we created based on our research findings, will help us later in the process to stay focused when building our user personas, journey, and potential solutions. A recap of our HMW questions here:
· improve upon the social development and structure of the in-person education experience through online learning?
· create a system to balance the busy lifestyle of parents and the educational needs of their children?
· maintain a flexible educational environment that is easily adaptable?
· better facilitate a connection between parents and teachers?
· create a single, streamlined communication platform?
Affinitazition & Takeaways
To better understand the users we create a solution for, we came up with three user personas, one for the parents, one for the students, and one for the teacher.
This helped us to stay focused on the actual problem we have to solve. It is also a good way when presenting the research to an audience to help them understand the problem space and create a connection.
A user journey of a parent and child during the work-from-home and online class time visualized the main problem areas for parents and helped visually explain the interruptions parents have to face when their kids are being taught in an online environment.
Concept Development
The next step in our project was the most exciting one - coming up with potential solutions for our target users to solve their problems. We started brainstorming and documented a couple of initial solution directions we found helpful for this problem space.
After evaluating our concept ideas, we decided to flush out two ideas and create sketches, an objective, a storyboard, and explain their functions, features, and tasks.
Concept 1 - Remote Focus
The concept behind remote focus is using haptic feedback and simple LED notifications combined with wristbands. The teacher will alert the parents about their child's behavior, who then is able to send alerts to their child in order to promote better focus. Our objective here was that the parents are still involved when monitoring their children but don't have to be in close proximity to their children. Another feature was that it crates quick and seamless communication from child to parent and the teacher can communicate with both the child and the parent. The feedback we received was that this will still be a distraction for the parents and could stop them from working.
Concept 2 - GamePlan
The second concept was an all-in-one platform that gamifies learning and adds social elements to homework from communal learning. Parents can create goals for their children, which gives them the option to drive their child's educational needs towards their expectations. The initial idea was to streamline teacher's tasks and engage children through gamified learning, thus making the parent's role in online education more straightforward. As you already know, we choose to move forward with the second concept - GamePlan. We started developing this idea further, did more research like competitor analysis, and re-defined our target user demographics.
Redefined Target Users
Choosing our concept called Gameplan, we had to redefine our target users.
We decided to split our target Demographic to PreK - 5th grade teachers and students.
We also had to take the parents into consideration and made them our secondary demographic.
Roles
One of the teacher's interviews helped us visualize our vision of GamePlan.
The teacher said, "Parents must be able to bridge what the teacher wants and what the student is doing."
Competitor Analysis
With the help of our user interviews and additional secondary research, we were able to find out that teachers currently have to use 4 or more applications to operate in an online class environment.
The competitor analysis made us define the goal of streamlining all those interactions in one platform.
Seeing how many applications teachers have to use, made us look into all the platforms that are out there and we created a chart to have an overview of positive and negative traits from all of the existing options.
We saw our unique selling points with GamePlan in creating a student-to-student collaboration, parental involvement, and gamification.
Our opportunity area of focus was in creating a collaborative and gamified student environment.
The focus of this class was on information architecture. We started to create blueprints, user task flows, and prototypes of interfaces for each, the teachers, the students, and the parents.
Teachers
For the teacher blueprint, we started laying out the basic functions they need from the interview data that we collected. The teacher's sections include the Classroom, Lessons, Assignments, Agenda, Messages, and their Profile.
We defined that one important aspect of the teacher's tasks is to create lessons for the students and showed the appropriate user tasks flow for that.
Students
The blueprint for students needed to have different sections like Homework, Lessons, and Character. We also included the Message Center and the GamePlan logo which will launch the interactive Hub World with the interactive learning experience.
An appropriate user task flow for the students will be signing up and entering the Hub World to start lessons, socialize with their friends in the Village or join Game Rooms.
Parents
The blueprint for the parents looks different because as we already defined they have different tasks to handle. The initial sections for parens were Lessons, Assignments, Agenda, Student Progress, Message Center, and their Profile.
An appropriate user task flow for the parents would be to access their child's assignment grades. Which we later in the progress tested on parents.
Interaction Model
We created an interaction model to show how each user will interact with each other and how what main roles they will take on in the game world.
The teacher will create levels and can join the game world when students need help.
The students are able to summon the teacher for help, play the lessons and compare their scores to other classmates.
The parents are able to be summoned as well when help is needed but the main function is that they can see the student's screen and see what the student is doing at the moment.
Each of the users is able to send messages to each other and communicate over the same platform.
User Testing
We were able to test ten different users. Five of the users were parents and teachers. Four users were elementary students. We also received feedback from a UX Design Expert, Angela Martin.
Before we tested these groups, we set testing goals that focused on our concept in general and our design decisions for the platform and Hub World.
We wanted to determine if the universal platform is viable and preferred. Did we improve the communication bridge between parents, teachers, and students? Does our system build an understanding of the roles for parents and teachers play in a child's education?
Design-based we wanted to see if all features of the platform are well integrated and easy to navigate. If our color and typeface choices are appropriate. Did our labels align with the user's mental model? Do we improve the user's confidence when using our platform?
User Testing - Feedback & Results
The parents and teacher gave us valuable insights into how we could improve our concept. They had some trouble with adapting to our layout and wanted it to be developed further. Positive feedback from a lot of users was they can see themselves using this platform if it would be integrated into their school district.
Our testing results showed that we have a redundant calendar and agenda interface which needed improvement. The parents and teacher agenda was also very poor to connect both parties with each other. Users also had difficulty orienting themselves in our new platform which could be solved with an onboarding experience.
System Usability Scale (SUS)
To be able to see how reliable our usability od design solutions were for the users, we used the SUS method. Even with some negative feedback we landed a usability score of 89.5, which showed us that we are on the right track with our concept. We created a questionair for the SUS with quesstions like, "I would imagine that most people would lern this system very quick", "I need to learn a lot of things before I could get going with this system" and "I found the various fundtions in this system were well integrated".
UX Expert Testing
Angelina gave us great insights into which areas we have a successful concept and where we need improvement.
Our platform was very streamlined and the labeling is consistent across all three user platforms.
She gave us feedback that our text size could be reduced to free up design space and that our Lessons and Agenda sections are redundant.
Final Concept - GamePlan
Teacher Interface
In the Classroom section, the teacher can adjust marks to percentages, letters, completion, and more. They can grade student's work right inside of the platform. They can toggle between class performance on a single assignment for the whole class and individual students and track the grades for each student individually. Teachers also have the ability to view student's attendance by week and month. They can also switch between several classrooms in the classroom section right below it. Within the student progress section, the teacher can create an agenda that is accessible to parents and students, where Zoom links can be incorporated. The final design also offers easy messaging within the platform.
Parent Interface
Parents can view assignment names and details in the Assignment section and access teacher comments on graded work. If the parents click on a specific assignment, they will access a summary sheet of the lesson. If they have multiple children, they can toggle in between each student's profile. With our concept, parents have the option to view their child's progress by subject and share the progress reports with spouses, teachers, etc. Students can summon parents to view their screens when questions come up. The parents can communicate with the teacher or student while viewing the problem at hand. The parents also have the option to control their child's screen to help troubleshoot issues from anywhere.
Student Interface
Finally, the student's interface and Hub World. Within the game world, students can complete activities to learn concepts for the day. They can access the daily schedule created by the teacher and get help with the clock of a button. Students enter doors in the Level Room to complete daily tasks. This may include watching videos, completing graded assignments, playing review games, and more. Game reviews allow students to work collaboratively. Gamification improves communication skills and overall understanding of concepts. After completing all assignments, students can access educational games in the Portal Room to continue practicing concepts while earning XP and coins for character and hut customizations. Students earn XP and coins in games to customize their hut and show their progress to classmates. In the character overview, they can see a visual representation of their lesson progress, how many XP and coins they have earned, and customize outfits.
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© 2024 by Maik-Sebastian Rieffenstahl