Design Research
Iterative Prototyping
Storyboarding
Team
Gene Azad, Anna Brink, Su Fang, Mauricio Herrera, Sneha Jain & Christy Zhang
Sponsors
Colin Narver, Denise Coveyduc & Caitlin MacRae
This was a project for Radical Collaborations at IBM, a collaborative course between The University of Texas at Austin and IBM Design.
September - December 2017
Lesson planning is only one of the many tasks that K-5 math teachers need to accomplish on a daily basis, but it is one of the most time consuming parts of their already busy jobs. Teacher Advisor with Watson, IBM’s philanthropic platform aimed at helping K-5 math teachers with lesson planning, launched in 2016. We were tasked with exploring how Teacher Advisor could better address these teachers’ needs of time and customization. Our solution allowed teachers to input a custom class profile and build lessons that are easily adapted so that their lesson plan works for everyone in their class.
Research & Empathy
We interviewed K-5 math teachers at a variety of experience levels as well as other stakeholders like their families or administrators. We learned that teachers have a busy day schedule, and lesson planning usually has to happen outside of their work hours, cutting into valuable time they have at home. Lesson plans also needed to be customized for each class, taking into account where each individual student is at in their learning. This flexibility isn’t available in any existing lesson planning resources and is something that takes most teachers trial and error to understand. These two needs of time and customization drove our design and were carried through from concept generation to our final prototype.
Concept Generation, Prototyping, Testing & Iteration
Our concept was to create a platform that allowed teachers to customize and save activities, display suggestions for similar activities based on ratings, and organize and highlight important information. We were inspired by Google Drive which allows for quick saving and sharing of files, nutrition facts which highlight essential information, Netflix which knows what the viewer likes and recommends content based on that, and word banks which clearly show available options.
We created a simple paper prototype, so users could interact with our concept. This showed us which mechanisms were easy to understand and which features felt unnecessary.
Solution & Future State
Our solution allows a teacher to input her class profile, building a customization tracker that fills up as activities that address that need are added to a lesson. A default lesson plan can easily be customized by dragging and dropping activity blocks. The time of the lesson is updated as activities are changed. Teacher Advisor will ask the teacher to rate lessons, allowing Watson to suggest better and more relevant activities.
Final prototype
Teacher Advisor with Watson has since added some of these features to its platform. Currently, teachers are able to check that they are seeking recommendations for students that are English language learners, have attention Issues, learning disabilities, or executive functioning issues which is factored into the recommended activities. Teachers are also able to customize a lesson by selecting and reordering activity blocks.