Homeschooling app for elementary school students, which aims to increase learning engagement and motivation through the use of specific gamification elements
Homeschooling has gained importance due to the initial school closures caused by the Corona pandemic. Teachers are often forced to look for individual solutions for assigning tasks to their students. In some cases, software solutions are already being used for this, but often students have to pick up their assignment sheets from the schools and complete entire blocks of assignments at home. A major problem is that not all children can be adequately supervised at home by their parents. In addition, many children have problems working on their school assignments independently. It is therefore important to awaken the intrinsic motivation of schoolchildren and give them an incentive to want to work on tasks independently.
A scientific study from Malaysia investigated the influence of gamification on students in the classroom. According to the study, gamification can have a positive impact on student motivation and engagement.
In this project, a mobile app was developed that allows students to
experience learning content and homework in a simple and playful way. The motivation of the students should be increased by gamification elements such as collecting stars, a ranking list and an avatar. In addition, an admin interface for teachers was designed, which allows teachers to enter their individual learning content and to keep track of the performance of their classes.
In a team of two designers, we conducted user research as well as conception and design of the application together in several iterations.
With a developed prototype, we then made usability tests and conducted quantitative UX studies.
2 Designers, 1 Product Owner and a team of developers.
The concept was developed in an iterative process. At the beginning, the rough framework was defined with the help of wireframe sketches and the basic idea was visualized. Once the entire concept had been developed the interface design for each screen was worked out. The app has a simple structure and should be as intuitive as possible for school children to use.
Users get a weekly overview of their current tasks, which are divided into the days of the week with tab navigation. For completed tasks, users receive stars that are collected throughout the school year.
The number of achievable stars per task should be determined by the teacher and should represent the difficulty of the exercise. For diligent students, there are extra tasks in addition to the weekly tasks to be able to collect even more stars.
The reward system through the collection of stars is a classic gamification element, which should increase the motivation of the students to voluntarily complete tasks.
To give students a sense of social connection, we have integrated a leaderboard in which all students in a class are ranked. Students compete using the stars they have collected from the assignments. As mentioned earlier, the stars are awarded based on diligence rather than performance. This is to keep the weaker students motivated, as they too can be at the top of the rankings. There is an overall ranking list and a separate ranking list for each school subject.
The IM-UX questionnaire for intrinsic motivation in user experience was used as a quantitative approach. The questionnaire serves as a measurement tool for considering the satisfaction of intrinsic needs in applications and is based on the Self-determination theory (SDT).
The results of the IM-UX questionnaire and the statements of the interviews confirm that gamification has a positive effect on students' intrinsic motivation to engage with educational materials. Our evaluation shows that gamification can help students to be more motivated to learn at home.
Overall, this project was a great showcase for an in-depth UX process, starting with user research, an extensive conceptual phase with multiple iterations, a collaborative UI design process, implementation and collaboration with a team of developers, as well as validation of the concept and business case through user testing.
