Kids' learning is not only confined to listening boring lectures and sitting on benches for long hours. Instead, they need more interaction, engaging and friendly environment. With the sudden change from offline to online educational mode, the kids of lower classes started losing interest. Getting bombarded with concepts, ideas, and theories often robs kids of their interest in a particular subject. Therefore, a kid's learning experience should be accompanied with fun elements. All the educational institutes and schools started using meeting platforms which were originally built for corporates. Kids of lower classes thus started losing interest due to the monotonous UI of those platforms.
Involved: Parents, Teachers and School Organisations Affected: Kids from kindergarten to class 5
Post lockdown, all the schools started using the meeting platforms which were originally built for the corporates. So the kids of lower classes started facing a lot of problems as they did not find the UI of those platforms interesting. Thus their development and growth is hindered and their attention span decreases.
- Research suggests that online learning has been shown to increase retention of information, and take less time, meaning the changes coronavirus have caused might be here to stay.
- While more than 90 per cent of the countries adopted digital and/or broadcast remote learning policies, only 60 per cent did so for pre-primary education.
- As a result, education has changed dramatically, with the distinctive rise of e-learning, whereby teaching is undertaken remotely and on digital platforms
This problem was faced all over the map post lockdown
- Kids’ brain function differently and they have their ways to deal with the world around them.
- They differ from adults in aspects like cognitive ability, categorization, reasoning, emotional control, logic and memory capacity.
- Lack of colours and objects which are the main visual guide for attracting attention and creating mood.
- By adding interactive features like animations and sound effects.
- Animated characters that make sound in response to the little kids’ actions are a great way to attract and retain attention.
- The interface should contain recognisable examples from real life, especially it is about nature such as water, trees and animals as it excites child’s imaginations.
Along with all the features which are for the kids, as developing a product ffor kids, we surely need a security feature or a portal for parents to keep a track on their kid's activities and progress. We are planning to come up with a feature through which parents who are working and cannot be at home during the class hours could know if their kid is attending the classes or not.
- Kids’ friendly UI
- A better and easy to understand homework section
- Avatar feature for both students and teachers
- Character animate plugin for techers
- Quiz with interactive features
- Security and parental controls
https://www.figma.com/file/eyhTphLAIZtH8YLrhiREy1/Eureka-Women-Techies?node-id=0%3A1
While building this platform, being freshers the biggest challenge we faced was implementing the video streaming using jitsy as none of us had any previous experience. Another challenge we faced was to style the whole platform using only css without using any advanced css like scss or sass which was also time consuming.
The biggest accomplishment is that we were able to implement the video streaming in our platform, instead of integrating it with meet. Designing and implementation of an appealing user interface was a great accomplishment for us. We presented the platform to our younger siblings and received a positive review from their end. Overall we are really happy with the website and we feel it can actually help thousands of kids who are not able to concentrate on their online classes.
The most important thing that we learnt by participating in this hackathon is the importance of focusing on the main part by thinking about the track and not getting stuck in the secondary stuff that need not be added. Had we focused too much on the intricacies like css styling and small animations without considering our target audience and the users needs, we would have never been able to implement all the features.