OYE

Helping students improve their social and emotional skills.

Education is not one size fits all and designing an inclusive learning environment is key for kids and young students to learn how to handle social and emotional situations.

OYE is an app concept born from a hackathon project that seeks to help young students master their social skills while staying focused on the learning curriculum at their school. It gives them an opportunity to be heard and speak their mind, without the social anxiety of classrooms.

Capabilities:
– UX design
– Design Sprint
– Delivering a presentation

Team:
Yendy Fermín

Time limitation:
8 hours

Tools:
– Marvel

The first EdTech hackathon in Madrid

Challenge

On November 23 and 24, SM Editorial (one of Spain’s biggest editorial houses) and KSchool organized the first UX Hackathon applied to the world of education in Madrid… and I took part in it! There were about 6 teams taking part.

The goal was to demonstrate and promote the value of user-centred design in projects related to the creation, evolution, and improvement of digital learning and teaching tools in primary and secondary education in Spain.

About the event 🔗

What clues and rules did they give us?

The hackathon focused on 5 criteria (revealed on the same day as the hackathon):

It must be a mobile product
Participants must deliver a functional prototype
Participants must argue their work before the jury in 5 minutes
Target: young students, 12-16 years old
Key challenge: encourage student participation in the classroom

Sub-objective: improve students’ work, motivation, and the results they obtained during class.

Where do we start?

¡Qué no cunda el pánico!

– Is Spanish for “Don’t panic, we got this”.

That is what we said to each other after hearing that we had 8 hours to present our final solution.

We knew we had little time, so the first thing we did was to define our design principles and do a rapid concept definition before starting to brainstorm and design the mobile app (or at least a rough MVP for it).

To achieve that…

created proto User Persona, a quick way to put ourselves in the shoes of young students in secondary school.
did some quick benchmarking analysis to understand the Edtech market and existing solutions that are tackling similar challenges for secondary school students.
ran an ideation exercise to start landing a few functionalities and ideas on paper
prioritized some of the ideas and started working on wireframes and user flows
built the digital prototype and created a PPT presentation to showcase our results in front of the other participants and the jury

Understanding the context and user

Proto-user persona

Defining our “proto” User Persona was key to understanding their potential needs and motivations. We did that by conducting a quick Desk Research about students’ behaviour in classrooms.

“Carlos is a good student who doesn’t want to talk or give his opinions during class, not because he doesn’t know the answers but because he doesn’t feel comfortable talking in front of others. He has many friends but is afraid of making mistakes or not giving the correct answer in front of others. He likes technology and uses his phone every day during class, but just as a distraction and sharing lots of photos and memes with his friends.”

Benchmarking

We analyzed 8 companies (international apps since we couldn’t find any in Spain) that we thought were targeting our user’s pains and revolutionizing the EdTech space. By benchmarking different apps in the market that we were able to identify some basic functionalities & areas to innovate.

Some of our findings:

Almost all EdTech apps focus on teachers or school admins in order to manage lessons and attendance.
The products or solutions that encourage student participation in class are targeted to children ( e.g. Mightifier, Lesson App).
Lots of apps are targeting language learning/teaching challenges (e.g. Duolingo), and if not they are mainly video-and content-based platforms (e.g. Moodle).
The content-based apps do offer in-class exercises or questionnaires, but in-group or team collaboration.
Among these apps, the ones that had a gamified experience seemed to be better ranked and have a better user reception.
None of these apps encouraged class participation or feedback to our target users.

What opportunity did we identify?

There’s a service offering gap in the market for our User Persona: foment and cultivate a participative classroom environment among young students so that they feel comfortable and confident enough to talk in front of a classroom.

Up until now, many EdTech tools focus on helping teachers to manage their student attendance, upload coursework or exercises, or generate content for students (mainly videos).

None of them focuses on creating a better learning class environment to make young students feel safe, nor do they encourage teachers or other students to give/receive positive feedback during classwork that can help build a safe space, social skills and emotional skills e.g. when delivering individual presentations, teamwork, etc…

Getting it down on paper

Ideating and sketching

We ran a quick ideation exercise where we wrote a list of ideas that we then discussed and voted on the ones we thought would deliver the most value to our users.

The MVP we chose to build focuses on collaboration, communication, and feedback between students when they are doing exercises, homework, and projects together. We also wanted to highlight the ability to build a positive feedback culture within the app.

🖍 🧠

Designing the user flow

Defining some of the key features was key in order to design some parts of the apps. I mapped and designed:

the login for students
the student’s lessons/classes overview
the feedback section between students and professors
the section or feedback rooms between students
chat with the professors and other students
the homework and coursework section per lesson

Our solution!

OYE 🔈

OYE is a mobile app concept for students and teachers that facilitates and promotes communication between student-teachers & student-student. It is focused on giving positive feedback after doing class assignments, group presentations, and homework. It should be primarily used in class so that teachers and students interact with it in real-time.

The idea was born because we identified that not everyone feels comfortable speaking up or saying something (positive) in front of a lot of people. With our concept, we wanted to foment positive interactions and give a voice to those who are scared to put their hands up during class.

Play with the prototype

🤔

Some final thoughts

As you might have guessed..no, we didn’t win. But it was such an enriching experience. Even though we didn’t have much time to work on the concept or do actual tests with users, it was great to just go from a very ambiguous challenge and idea to a working prototype in less than 8 hours. It thaught me about prioritization, teamwork, and time management. Also, markers and pencils are your best allies when trying to write down ideas and execute them fast;)

OYE