The National School of Buenos Aires (Colegio Nacional de Buenos Aires) wanted a web platform for language students studying Spanish and Latin to help them complete grammar and other language exercises with automated assistance, while increasing student engagement and interest.
We began by studying our end-users. By speaking with and surveying teachers and students about their challenges, we learned how teachers design assignments for students, how students complete assignments, what the most frequent mistakes were, and much more. Then, we designed requirements and wireframes centered on users’ needs.
We interviewed the teachers several times. We asked them to bring everyday exercises they use in their classrooms. They explained the goals and expectations and solved the exercises themselves live so that we can learn the whole process step by step. We did this the traditional fashion, in the paper. Then, taking those notes with some handwriting, we designed the user interface for the very first view within the web platform: the one to solve an exercise and check whether it is correct or not.
We learned how teachers design assignments and how students complete them. With that knowledge, we designed a web interface so that teachers can create a new assignment from scratch and edit it later - they can set a sentence to be analyzed, choose an assignment type (such as words analysis, grammar, and syntax). The teacher can add several steps to the assignment so that students can go through a process from the simple to the complex when completing that assignment - working over the same sentence. Furthermore, teachers can organize assignment into folders, and every course has its folders and assignments.
On the other hand, students can join a course in the first place. Then, they can browse the folders and engage with assignments. A toolbar and an easy-to-use user interface allow the student to select one or more words in the sentence and then use the toolbar answer to that selection. Since the teacher told the system what the right answers are, then the student gets automated assistance when making a mistake by knowing exactly which answers are wrong and getting a tip message to guide them to the right answer. Tip messages can be tailored by the teacher to match most frequent mistakes.
Addressing one of the key components of this web platform at the very beginning of the project allowed us to get the hardest part done in the early stages, it had a 7-months time frame. We got feedback about it sooner, thus making it easier to iterate and get a design that made the client happy and a user experience they enjoyed. Then, we addressed other features and views which were less complicated, thus making it smoother to move forward and show progress to the stakeholders.
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