eli is a physical device that promotes interactions within the online classroom by gamifying the experience, aiming to facilitate suitable support for online students suffering from feelings of isolation and disconnectedness.
Our task...
We were tasked with finding a community/audience that is experiencing shared disadvantages, and develop a technology to aid this audience. Keeping a high amount of accessibility in mind, the product should empower the users to engage in their broader community.
By entering the space of problems in online learning, we understood that we would find many avenues of particularly disadvantaged groups to pursue. We discovered through a rigorous process of second hand discovery and discussion with stakeholders that the process of learning is multi-faceted, and that education is not limited to the processes of teaching and learning, but is influenced by all factors that surround a student.
This reaffirmed our initial aim and focus on community and relationships as a integral parts of the educational experience, which led to us settling on our problem statement:
-> How can we facilitate support for students suffering from feelings of isolation and disconnectedness in remote learning environments?
We collaboratively created a competitor analysis on current online learning tools and platforms such as Moodle, Edmodo, Edrolo and Google Classrooms.
"When they gave us Edrolo, we learned everything from there. Our teacher just became someone you might ask questions during class."
- Interviewed Year 12 HSC student, 2020
Through a process of interviews and questionnaires we primarily interrogated the student and teacher perspectives of online learning.
These artifacts of information, quotes, statistics and insights allowed us to create sticky notes for our affinity diagramming in the next exercise.
Our affinity diagramming exercise allowed us to combine our findings of all our primary and secondary research into one cohesive narrative, creating four core themes of needs and wants of our stakeholders:
With these goals in mind, we were finally able to develop our project’s aim. When in doubt, we shall be anchored and focused on our defined aim and its goals to achieve it.
Andreas' personas would be used to inspire and test our concepts with. These personas included a shy student, a highly engaged learner, and an alienated teacher.
Inspired by the personas, through a mix of we collaboratively underwent a session of crazy 8's and other generative methods, we developed a dozen concept bases to work on.
These storyboards from Alex and Andreas were vital in conceptualising how our user would navigate through these ideas. How would they interact with such a device or interface?
We utilised our decision matrices to judge our concepts against a set of criterion that we devised based on our data synthesis and previous research.
After taking into account these weighted criterion, a clear winner emerged; the engagement companion device.
This concept centres around the core value and idea of isolating engagement as it’s own separate entity that deserves it’s own dedicated tool. We suggest a physical device, to stand out from the bevy of ‘digitally overloaded’ devices that we use to online learn, that is used to quickly interact with either the class, students or the teacher.
I quickly did some rapid 3D prototyping in VR. I modelled while in my VR headset, streaming it over the internet to my partners while we collaboratively made suggestions to gain a better understanding of our desired form and interaction.
A key tenet of our concept was to not try to solve every issue, but to focus on solving one problem really well. We would carry this idea into our testing methodology, of which we decided to break into our three components:
There was plenty of risk for bias, as we are students ourselves. Using Alex's assumption chart below, we sought to keep these biases in mind in the purple and pink boxes, as these were the notions that posed the biggest risk to our design.
We made a series of questions based of our newfound research to delve deeper into possible latent needs. They ranged from general questions about students habits and desires, and how students engaged with each other and teachers.
Due to not being able to watch students in class via observation, I developed a multi-mode experiment that relied on two elements; my chatbot designed to emulate in-person observation, and my web prototype that looked at necessary interactions a user may want.
From this exercise, we needed to fix these problems that students were feeling:
- Awkwardness in classes
- Lack of accomplishment
- Long silences
- Lack of interaction
My web prototype’s function was to so I could test the different types of interactions that users may want to use on our device. Being an online web prototype allowed us some flexibility for the user testing phase of our project.
The three sketches by Alex all iterated between differing forms of engagement; a squishy touch bar, a rotational twist engagement, and a circular touch based UFO form.
We also looked at developing an interaction method that was harmonious with the form.
From my model, we would be able to present this form to our testers and peers at the test fair and gain feedback from other design-oriented peers about where to improve.
Through our experience sampling the prototypes through different users during classes, we found many problems to fix.
We noticed recurring comments about over-stimulation, confusion, and awkwardness with messaging. This clearly went against our goal to break out engagement.
The format for the test fair methodology involved think aloud testing, post-test interviews and a system usability scale (SUS) inspired survey while they went through our prototypes.
--> Rethinking what we've broken
We performed a brainstorming session as a group by looking at all our problems, pasting them in and coming up with solutions.
The online teacher dashboard would be one part of the online eli system. This tells the teacher critical information in a low-density data environment.
Ahead is the work done to create the final product. The 3D model and product. The online dashboard platform.
I modelled the device myself, split into multiple pieces. The base would house the electronics, the face houses the display, and the faceplate to remove/place on top of the display.
A friend with a 3D printer kindly allowed us to use his printer to create our device!
We could also print in different materials, so we printed the base in a transparent material for a nicer aesthetic. The rest was printed in a silvery 'Apple' colour.
Developed by Alex, inspired from the earlier mockups, he created the online dashboard on Webflow with links to Zapier. This dashboard is home to the data posted by students and keeps track of how they're going in class via their eli.
This process designed and developed by Alex Pribula with JavaScript coding help by me, we created the student onboarding system (seen in the video) allowing students to create their own custom emojis that they can use on the eli device.
- Due to time constraints and multiple parts failing, we used an Apple Watch for prototyping/LED screen, next time we would develop on a local device.
- Full pairing between eli and the dashboards (this would mean local processing on the device and an ongoing server)
- Limited functionalities on the hub (milestones/insights are static, would need heavy datavis/code implementations)
.jpg)
