App for Primary Schools
About
OBJECTIVES
To develop an iPad application that helps primary school pupils to acquire new skills, collaborate with each other, get teachers’ advice and earn credentials for their achievements.
CHALLENGE
Our American Client approached CPCS with a request to develop a learning application for iPads. The Client’s vision embraces equipping primary schools with educational courses already uploaded into the Client’s iPads for distribution. The initial request was to develop this application without the need to use any of the servers’ capacities, including AWS, suggested by our engineers.
To design a learning application for educational purposes is a challenge itself, but to discover a solution for primary school pupils is a very interesting project as it should include all possible gamification techniques to keep our end users engaged and highly motivated to self-study within the application.
SOLUTION
Together with the Client we started our platform discovery session with a discussion on the Client’s vision of the use cases. Later, we designed a number of mockups for our Client to choose from. According to the user logic, discovered together with the Client, when a pupil’s profile is ready, school folks can use a gamified password (e.g. three apples) to log into the app and begin using the platform.
Students’ features include: choose an avatar from many cool options, choose one of three Pathways of the system (Art & Design, Engineering, Programming), continue from the exact lesson/season/module they finished at, gain achievements and badges, collaborate within one of the app’s three interactive roles (Driver, Co-pilot, Advisor), and much more. All the educational activities within the app are gamified and its design is full of fun icons and interactive scenarios.
Teachers can do the following within the platform: open new profiles for students, schedule interactive classes, see student’s progress and achievements, give credits within the app, etc. The system logs students’ progress as they cover the educational pathways offered and the Synch feature allows users to continue their education from any iPad gadget with the application, which is possible due to the synchronization of all the created media files and educational content.
Technology choice
- Native app development for iOS
- Java
Team and Duration
- 1 Java engineer
- 1 iOS engineer
- 0.5 project manager
- 0.5 business analytic
- 1 QA engineer
- 6 months for the MVP
RESULTS
CPCS developed a gamified educational application for primary school folks that have an access to iPads with Art & Design, Engineering, and Programming pathways uploaded by the Client’s company.
Schools that apply our Client’s iPads for their extracurricular programs testify that the application keeps their pupils motivated and involved into the educational process more than ever.
All the avatars, achievements, badges and other elements of the gamification process within the system help our students stay engaged; namely, to learn while playing, which is one of the aims of a modern educator for primary schools.
The application with its roles and multi-level modules also allows teachers to support a seamless educational process within mixed classes regarding students’ age, abilities and progress they’ve made.
