The Masters Academy

Designing bite-sized learning experience for STEM Educators in the Phillipines

Overview

This is a client project for a education foundation in the Phillipines with the goal to help STEM Educators to access resources that will help them improve knowledge mastery and pedagogical skills.

I joined the project during its second phase as an Interaction Designer, when the first phase of research with educators, students, and experts are done, in order to deliver an MVP that is rooted in research insights. My role was designing the mobile app experience based on research insights and client needs, I also help ran the week-long user testing sessions with a group of teachers and was responsible for synthesizing the feedback and iterating the design, and producing the final design and prototypes for client presentation.

Role & Duration

Interaction Designer

User Research, Wireframing, Interaction & Visual Design, User Testing, Prototyping

Team: 1 Project Lead, 1 Design Researcher, 2 Interaction Designers, 1 Communication Designer

Duration: Nov 2021 - Feb 2022 (4 months)

The Problem

During the first phase of the project, our Design Researcher uncover that one of the most unmet needs of Phillipines STEM Educators:

For context, these educators have very busy lives and usual lectures and stuff doesn’t help.

  1. is that they have a need to improve or refresh their STEM foundational knowledge, but lack resources and platforms to do so. Our team decided to focus on designing bite-sized learning modules offered through a mobile app that would fit into the teachers’ busy lives and could be tailored to their needs.

  2. Lesson plans that can be easily customized and help improve teaching methods

  3. Shared learning experience and a longing for community

When I joined the project, they have identified 3 opportunity areas and was ready to start ideating.

How might we design a mobile app that can address these needs?

The Process

    1. Ideation in each opportunity areas

    1. My role: to help with ideation, I did product research in the education tech to help with inspiration.

  2. Build, prototype, and learn with the teacher community

    1. I was mainly responsible for running the Educator Council for rapid iteration on our concepts. Everyday

Design Iteration Example

  1. the initial design

  2. teacher’s feedback and learnings

  3. iterated v1

  4. final version

Impact

The MVP was used in a roadshow to get stakeholder buy-in and has successfully got buy in, and has now been developed and is being piloted tested in public schools with positive feedback. It will soon be scale to schools across the country,

Learnings

  1. The importance of understanding the context and designing and doing research that fit into teacher’s lives, instead of otherwise

  2. Design for learning, for storytelling, not obsessed with high-fidelity. Just enough fidelity to learn and iterate.

  3. When getting buy-in, telling the design in a story with research insights is important, now just showing the final design. I learned a lot from the team from the way they present to clients in digestable yet consistent ways, giving context and insights of how the design can help address the problem.