Design For Good

This project investigates ways to support underprivileged schools in Uganda by providing a cost-effective, responsive, and technological solution that benefits school proprietors, teachers, and students alike. The project was awarded 1st place at the JP Morgan Chase <design for good> Hackathon.

Duration: 12 Hours

Role: UI/UX Design and Research

(team of 6)

Tools: Figma, Fig Jam, Canva, Adobe Illustrator

Deliverables: High-Fidelity Responsive Wireframes and a Research Presentation

What is the
backstory?

Opportunity International's EduQuality program enhances the quality of education in low-cost private schools serving extremely poor communities. Focusing on three key areas:
1. Improving school culture, school management, and teaching and learning
2. Upgrading teaching practices to improve student performance
3. Enhancing school management practices to make the most of scarce resources

Following initial research and looking into the user personas of teachers and school proprietors from Uganda, we decided to help solve issues centered towards teachers. This leads us to our problem statement:

Teachers struggle with existing lesson planning tools that are often complex, time-consuming, or expensive, limiting their ability to spend quality time on student engagement and individualized support.

Moses a school proprietor in Wakiso, Uganda who operates a low-cost private school, wants to participate n Opportunity International's
EduQuality program. So what is the design question?
How can technology and innovative strategies help Moses improve teacher retention, and teaching practices and enhance overall educational quality in his low-cost private school?

We were tasked to envision a solution that involves strategies or integration of cost-effective technology which could:
•Improve teacher professional development & retention
•Improve teacher lesson planning and delivery
•Improve student assessment
•Improve early-grade literacy outcomes
•Improve school administration, including school quality assessments and school development planning

As this tech solution will serve a very wide range of people, we were tasked to design a responsive tool that aimed to help school proprietors or teachers. For this challenge, we were told to assume that every user will have access to the internet but be mindful of the resource-constrained environment of extremely poor communities. But most importantly we had to consider how the solution could be adaptable to the varying digital literacy levels of staff and students.

End Result

Meet Jaqueline

The largest stakeholders in these schools currently facing struggles are teachers and their students.

Jaqueline is a teacher in Uganda and the main problems she faces from day to day are:

Assessment: Keeping track of student engagement and learning
Lesson Planning: Creating new lesson plans in a timely and efficient manner
Connection: Due to poor electricity tablets don't always connect or update

Asking the Right Questions

We conducted a brief yet thorough secondary research keeping these three main research questions in mind

1. What is Lesson Planning?

2. How can Technology aid Lesson Planning?

3. Where do Students Play a Role?

Here were our key takeaways.

Learning objectives are ranked by importance and taught in the same order

Using technology to upload previous lesson plans and topics taught in class

Technology can decrease human error and increase pace of creation

Incorporting student data into lesson plans make them more personalized and effective

Multidisciplinary tool

We understood that the technology incorporated into our solution needed to multitask: providing effective lesson plans using student data, adapting to different environments and resource conditions, and, most importantly, being easy and cost-effective to use.

AI Integration
+
Data Collecting Hardware

So How Does it Work?

1. Given examples of effective lesson plans, different components of a lesson plan, and how different factors like class size, duration, and age might affect said lesson plan

2. Uses data from the Uganda curriculum as well as in-class syllabus uploads when offline; when online incorporate previous lesson plans and student data

3. Constantly updates data when online

4. Gathers student data from in-class participation quizzes and interaction questions through a checkpoint system using the interactive hardware

Hardware Prototype

A smart easy solar-powered toggle that allows students to answer yes or no, true or false, or questions regarding overall understanding. The toggles transmit this data through Bluetooth signaling. Instead of colors, we used icons for better universal understanding.

Cost Breakdown: $5-$10 to create----> Long-term investment, long lifetime

Having our tool researched and scoped out we designed our final responsive site keeping the restrictions of AI and the design of the toggle in mind.

Home

Our Design System Concept

The yellow was used to emphasize a sense of joy and neural calmness, advocating for anxiety and stress free schooling; not only for students but also teachers

So what happens next?
We hope to see this implemented in the future by Opportunity International!

and that was our Final solution :)

Contributions

For this project I worked on researching technology tools for lesson planning, cost breakdown of hardware toggles, and co-designed all wireframes including making them responsive and interactive

Want to know more?

If you would like more information on our team, research, findings, and analysis take a look at our research and final presentation below!