"Learning through play can dynamically bridge the gap inequalities have created in education"

Overview

Quinde is an application that focuses on creating a positive learning experience by providing opportunities for children to learn creatively and immersively. By providing resources and activities, parents and guardians can facilitate a child’s learning. Together, they can engage in fun, hands-on activities that offer an accessible and enjoyable educational journey.

Summary of Responsibilities

- Design App
- Prototype
- Big Hero Image
- Proposal Boards

Tools Used
- Figma
- Miro
- Google Docs

Duration Fall 2021
September - December

THE PROBLEM

“How can we support a number of families, and communities to play and learn creatively at home?”

After being presented with the problem brief, the disparities between students' education were perplexing. A key issue was the absence of internet access in rural Ecuador, an increasingly challenging issue for undertaking a digital project. Getting students to school facilities which are at great distances, is another barrier.

INFORMATION GIVEN

As we widespreadingly adopt remote learning over the past two years, pre-exisitng learning inequalities have intensified. This is particularly potent for low income families and rural communites.
Studies have shown that learning gamification and play have closed students' achievement gaps and lessened learning inequalities. However parents are no longer playing with thier children.

Research and Findings

Initial Findings

20%
of students have computers for their personal use.

37%
of the country’s households have internet access.

6 out of 10

students believe they’re learning less during the pandemic

46%
of people had access to a phone in 2019.

Parental Involvement helps children become more motivated, engaged and overall they have more fun while learning

Interviews

To better understand our users and their needs we needed to conduct interviews. We interviewed teachers and parents to gather more information to aid children. We concluded, that parents's involvment is indispensable.

Goals

Motivation

Keeping children interested through achievable goals, fun tasks and easy to understand material.

Contextualisation

We needed to create something that would transfer well into the real world. This was something that supplemented their school education using real world scenorios

Rich Media Mix

Learning through play, hands on learning as well media forms outside of the digital space were key to making this work

User Needs and Desires

USER NEEDS & DESIRES

Families in Ecuador need an alternative avenue of learning, secondary to school environments. A school setting can evoke stress and they often lack sufficient funding due to corrupt governments and other social and economic factors.

Our solution needed to be accessible without constant internet access.

Parental involvement is key to learning. Studies have shown kids whose parents are active in their child's learning are in a better position to achieve learning goals.

Children require stimulation. We need to create activities that were not only offline but also distance children from screen time. This has many benefits that can benefit a child's development.

Ideation

"We wanted to inspire play, now we have to figure out how"

We need a way to gamify learning

2 PERSON APPROACH TO LEARNING

PARENT

CHILD

Idea Proposal

After brainstorming an idea, we drafted a proposal. This is a video outlining the details.

PERSONA AND USER JOURNEY MAP

After our idea was approved, we created a user journey map and personas. We established two separate personas and user journey maps to differentiate a child's profile and a parent and guardian's profile. While the app is geared to parents, the child's experience needed to be just as engaging.

PARENT

CHILD

Design

After our designs were approved, it was time to create some visuals to understand how our app would look and feel. We wanted to also associate a theme.

Wireframes

Once our wireframes were ready once we had a feel for our appliaction and beong able to haver a user flow, as well the features we needed. We moved into the design after a couple of iterations

Early Designs and Inspiration

Our design took a lot of time to configure. We went back and forth, but we decided for flat characters with a mix of geometric shapes and lines

These are some quick sketches that we came up with help us feel out how our app would look like, we tossed most of these designs but it helped us get closer to what we wanted to create.

There were two major components for these visuals: Big Hero Image where we would use one image to illustrate our app and a Big Idea summary which would highlight our thought process and execution.

Branding Guide

Proposal Boards

After creating our big hero image and branding guide we had to figure out the proposal boards. These boards highlighted what the project was about into sections.