Game-ifying Math Education
My Story
I’ve always hated math classes. Not because the material was too difficult to understand, but the fact that students were rarely ever on the same page. Due to the competitive nature of a GPA system, many students may feel left behind while their fellow classmates may even feel dragged down. I never liked being the kid in class who didn’t understand a concept, and this discouragement only compounded into a lack of attention during class. I also never liked students who would ask questions about concepts that I already understood. It made learning feel like a chore. My proposal is a virtual learning environment that allows students to grock concepts independently while teachers can aid students who are falling behind and award students who are ahead.
PEST Analysis(Political, Social, Economic, Technological)
A PEST analysis for this project idea would look something like this. Politically, public school education curriculums dictate the content students are required to learn, and the rules of those schools force students to stay in class with other students of the same age, instead of the same competency levels. Economically, schools are expensive to start given real estate prices. However, I could imagine a digital learning platform disguised as a social network, that would encourage students’ curiosity, while also promoting healthy relationships with fellow peers. We could game-ify the learning process with awards for students’ understanding of concepts and still maintain the socialization that mainstream early education emphasizes. Socially, many parents already regularly send students to school almost as a form of day-care, so the best implementation of such a product would be as a supplement to established school curriculums. Technologically, it may be hard for some parents to provide smartphones or laptops to their children, so this limits the initial reach of the product.
Competition
While there are a lot of amazing resources available online to learn mathematics concepts, some that I have personally used are Brilliant.org and KhanAcademy.org. Schoolyourself.org, an example product that I found online is interesting as it offers a personalized experience for the user. According to this competitive matrix, our proposed product would focus on matching the social and curriculum standard of traditional systems, while also personalizing a student’s learning experience.
User Research
Doing user interviews brings us closer to our customers so that we may better understand their problems and so that we can build something that they would want to use. We interviewed multiple students, all who are currently in college.
The Product Design
I help K-12 students achieve better scores, through an online learning and social network. In addition to curriculum based content like our competition, we will also feature a social network for students. This benefits our students by providing them with an accountability network and easier access to their teachers.
The Value of Doing User Interviews
Talking to users directly gives developers insights into what problems their users really have. An idea for a product is just a hypothesis about the future, and by conducting interviews, users can share more about their lives that developers originally had no idea about. Structuring a user interview involves thinking about problems that users face daily and developing questions around that problem space.
Questions
Here are some of the questions that I asked for potential users. Why do you use social media? Do you play video games? What was your experience like during K-12? The questions were designed to find out more about a user’s life in the ares of social media, gaming, and K-12 education all while allowing the interviewee the freedom to share all of their thoughts on the given subject while not straying too far away from the interview topic.
Answers
I mainly interviewed college-aged students who have graduated from high school. Some insights were the global perspective on early education. Since I personally studied from an early age in the United States, I didn’t really consider the fact that other students had different systems if they had lived in other parts of the world. I also learned that a student’s culture at home influences and shapes their ideas on education and their relationship toward it. One interviewee mentioned how their parents didn’t speak English at home which decreased their likelihood of knowing some vocabulary.
The Product Idea
My idea is to create an online platform that creates a globalized curriculum for K-12 that incentives student competency through a game-like mechanism. The advantage of having such a game encourages students to be able to engage and learn alongside students from other cultures as opposed to traditional systems that mainly engage students at a local or regional scope.
User Journey
A user’s journey through this product would consist of signing up with an username and password. User’s would be able to select subjects that they would like to study and also compare how they are doing with other users. The purpose of the user journey is to create a story that the design of the product can fit around.
Wireframes
The purpose of wireframes are to create a blueprint for engineers to match when they are building out a product. From here, I don’t plan on building out the product just yet. I think that the traditional subjects should be different considering our information age.
