GoTracker | Qianhui's Website

GoTracker

A Learning Management System Specially for K12 Project-Based Learning

This project won National Science Foundation i-corps grant

Link to Hifi Prototype

01 OVERVIEW

Client:

Winchestor Thurston School

Teammates:

Wei Gong,
Xiaofei Zhou,
Sarah Schultz,
Canhai Chen

Duration:

Oct. 2018 - Mar. 2019

My Contributions:

Did extensive literature review on crowd critique & mastery transcript
Interviewed 10+ students & teachers
Observed PBL classroom
Brainstormed different design solutions and did speed dating with target users
Collaboratively designed lo-fi to mid-fi prototypes and iterated
Led customer discovery and problem validation.
Wrote business plan to win NSF i-corps grant, 2019 McGinnis Venture Competition

Problem Space:

Winchester Thurston School (WT) is an independent school in Pittsburgh who has more than 20 years of experience in facilitating Project-Based Learning (PBL) courses. They have a program called City as Our Campus that delivers authentic learning experiences for students from diverse backgrounds and academic interests by working with local communities. In a course called Research Science, students form groups to work on a project of their own interests, e.g. building a holder for people having breast cancer, an anti-slippery mat for temporary settlement in quake-striken areas.

Through our user research on teachers & students, we found there are 3 persistent problems in PBL:

Tools:

Sketch, Figma, Final Cut Pro

LOSE TRACK OF GOALS

HARD TO COLLABORATE

HARD TO GIVE FAIR ASSESSMENT

Impact:

We applied and won National Science Foundation i-Corps grant, 2019 McGinnis Venture Competition Finalist.

CS Teacher @ Winchestor Thurston School

“I think it definitely helps us solve a lot of problems in our class right now, like workflow management."

Teacher of Research Science @ Winchestor Thurston School

"I like the idea of giving multiple kinds of evidence for assessment."

Our Solution:

GoTracker is a learning management system that helps teachers and students have a better management PBL workflows & learning gains.

Design Challenge:

How might we create a better learning experience for the students in Project-Based Learning courses?

Testimonials:

See the quotes and testimonial video from our target users below:

02 HIGHLIGHTS

Highlights

# HIGHLIGHT 1

CO-DESIGN LEARNING GOALS

Teachers would set course - level learning goals that apply to all the students. Students design their own learning goals for their own projects. Teachers need to approve / suggest modifications to students' learning goals.

LEARNING THEORY

Personalized learning
Learner agency

# HIGHLIGHT 2

SCAFFOLDED WEEKLY TASKS

Students learn to specify weekly tasks by breaking learning objectives into small-actionable items, referencing ABCD goal-setting template. Teachers would also provide feedback and guidance to students' task setting.

LEARNING THEORY

Scaffolding & fading

# HIGHLIGHT 3

MAKE DOCUMENTATION & TAG COLLABORATORS

Students would upload their work in progress and tag their collaborators on a weekly basis.

LEARNING THEORY

Self-reflection
Formative assessment

# HIGHLIGHT 4

FINAL GRADING & VISUALIZATION

Teachers can use learning goal achievement, task completion percentage, and self-reflection as reference points to assess student’s individual work. When hovering over each chart bar, students could see a detailed explanation of why the bar is visualized in the way it is.

LEARNING THEORIES

Self-reflection
Formative assessment

Jump to Final Design

Learner Journey Map

Research

03 RESEARCH

Overview

Goals

With the broad problem space in mind, our research aims to answer the following 3 questions:

Q1. What are the problems / trends in the PBL landscape and what are the best practices to successful PBL experience?

Q2. According to school teachers & administrators, what are the biggest problems in PBL?

Q3. According to students, what are the biggest problems in PBL?

Process & Insights

Q1. What are the problems / trends in the PBL landscape?

Literature Review

We read 10+ academic papers, from which 2 research stands out.

Crowd critique platform: How to use scaffolded template to generate quality feedback

Mastery Transcript: How to assess & report skills and mastery levels

Expert Interview

Goals:

Understand how experts document their project-making process.
Specify the challenges / key decision points in experts' portfolio-making process.

Process:

Our interview questions fell into the following six categories: motivation to document, frequency of documenting, project choice, procedures, tools for documentation, and pain points. We summarized our interview findings into profile boards.

Insights:

We summarized experts' workflow using flow model and drew the following 4 insights and design implications.

Click to See Flow Model

Insights

Design Opportunities

Q2. Understand stakeholders:what are their challenges?

Stakeholder Interview

Goals:

Understand the status quo of Project-based Learning in Winchestor Thurston school
Understand the problems and challenges from the perspectives of various stakeholders

Process:

We did stakeholder interviews and classroom observation (contextual inquiry). Our interview questions revolve around the following aspects:

Instructors’ preparing and teaching process
Students’ general learning & project making process
Students’ portfolio documentation process
Evaluation and critique of students’ project and portfolio

Insights:

We summarized our interview findings using affinity diagramming & diagnostic mapping, and categorized problems into 3 different categories: Project-making, Collaboration, Assessment and draw the following 4 insights (model credit: Wei Gong):

Click to See Diagnostic Mapping

1. Students may need evidence for the progress and achievement they have made during the process of project making in order to encourage themselves when they encounter difficulties and feel frustrated.

2. It’s difficult for the students to keep track of their learning goals during project making process due to the unawareness from the beginning of the project and lack of targeted and in-time feedback from teacher along the process. ‍

3. It’s difficult for the teacher to assess each student’s performance due to lack of evidence of each one’s contribution and improvement along the whole process, which is the key pain point for the teacher of PBL courses.

4. It’s important to showcase students’ improvement and achievements through PBL both for their parents to accept this innovative method of pedagogy and for them to apply for university

Q3. Understand Students, are they feeling the same pain points?

Goals:

Validate our findings from students' perspectives
Explore whether students have specific needs that are not covered in teachers' interviews

Survey

We sent out survey to 13 students and corroborated most problems that teachers mentioned from students' sides (e.g., easy to lose track of goals, hard to collaborate, etc.). We summarized students into 2 types: collaborator & individualist.

Collaborators like to work within a group, solve problems, get peer feedback, gain depth of knowledge, and become independent of instructor. While they struggle with using certain techniques, lacking of domain knowledge, determining next steps and staying on tasks.

Individualists like to work continuously to finish projects, learn time management skills, work on real-world applications and create useful things. Some struggles are shared by collaborators and individualists alike, e.g., to use certain techniques and to determine next steps. Different from collaborators, individualists think their greatest gains from PBL is research skills while they sometimes struggle with working with peers.

Collaborator

Individualist

See Survey Questionnaire

See Relationship Model

Final Design Questions

04 IDEATION & VALIDATION

Ideation & Validation

How might we design a PBL experience that could engage students throughout the learning process?

How might we design a PBL experience that teaches students how to collaborate well with others?

How might we design a PBL experience that enables teachers to give fair assessment to students at the minimum cost of time?

User Research Synthesis

We use relationship model to synthesize findings from all 3 previous user research. We identified 4 problem spaces as well as the problems within each one of them.

& INSTRUCTORS

Assessment

Scaffolding

Communication

Learning goals

& PEERS WITHIN THE GROUP

Collaboration

Peer feedback

Assessment

& MENTORS

Availability

Ability

& PEERS IN OTHER GROUPS

Unfamiliarity

Peer critique

Assessment

Brainstorm & Storyboarding

Goals:

Brainstorm solutions that could potentially solve problems in different problem space
Do speed dating with stakeholders to the attractiveness and feasibility of each idea

Process:

I grouped all proposed ideas into the following 4 categories: Feedback, Assessment, Domain Knowledge Help, and Learning Goals

Speed dating results:

All the users like specialized learning goals, visualized achievement bar
The added value would be: instructors could save lots of time & improve effectiveness of PBL course delivery

05 PROTOTYPING & TESTING

Lo-fi & Mid-fi Prototype

1. Lo-fi Prototype & User Testing 1

Process:

We did the first round of user test with the students in the course Computer Science Innovation, a PBL course in WT school taught by Mr. David Nassar.