Overview
Pangolin: Enpower teachers to drive learning progress
Pangolin is a facilitative teaching and learning platform that delivers insightful information and support teachers to provide better instructions to students.
Outcome
Got a 100% overall teachers/students satisfaction rate in user research.
MY ROLE
End-to-end Product Design Lead
STAKEHOLDERS
5 Persons team (PMs and engineers)
TIMELINE
Feb 2020 - Oct 2020 ( 8 month )
Business opportunity
Providing more support to programming classes in middle schools
Cooperating long-term with more than 20,000 middle schools and millions of students in China, our client, Cross Domain sees the trend of programming education in China, and searches for the opportunity that brings better programming education to in-school classes.
My role
As a product designer, I ...
Problem space
Teachers don't really know each student's learning progress in class.
Design evaluation
Success in design metrics
We interviewed 7 teachers in the last round of usability testing, consulted with the development team of Cross Domain ( our Client) and CMU professors, to gather their feedback and evaluation on the platform.
Final design
View 01 Students’ practice system
View 02 Annotate Students’ mistakes
View 03 List of students’ performance
Contact me via Email (yuejiang@andrew.cmu.edu) if you want to Interested to see the whole product.
Refine the goal
Providing teachers with better support to assist students better
Starting from a broad business goal without direction, we conducted multiple research to narrow down scope and identify valuable design goals from both business and users’ side and make sure the refined goal will bring value to users as well as achieve the business impact.
From business to design
Target the design goal in business context
In order to make sure that our targeted design goal fits in with client’s business strategy and bring values to their business goals. We did multiple research to:
1. Understood what buyers -- middle schools -- valued and how they evaluated a programming learning tool;
2. Delved into competitors in Chinese market to identify niche markets and opportunities;
3. Compared the mature market in U.S. with the new one in China and uncovered future trends
From users to design
Target the design goal from users’ side
Beared what we learned from business side in mind, we conducted further and more in-depth research on target users and synthesized thoroughly to think from users’ perspective and (make sure ....)finalize our design goal. Through the research, we aimed to:
1. Identify key stakeholders and target users;
2. Understood the challenges target users faced and workarounds they employed;
3. Acknowledge main scenarios in learning experience.
Insight 01 >>
Learning programming in school is trending but not important enough.Facing with the High School Entrance Exam, middle school students spent most of their time on main curriumlum. It is hard for them to find enough time to learn programming after class.
Insight 02 >>
It is hard for teachers to provide sufficient support for each student in the classIn Chinese classes, the Pupil-Teacher ratio is at least 30. It is too hard for a teacher to take care of each student in the 45-minute classtime.
Insight 03 >>
It is hard to keep students on the same page in programming learning.Students come to the class with various interests, capabilities and previous knowledge. Some learned programming before or naturally have stronger interests than others.
Insight 04 >>
progamming has high threshold for beginners, so they need more personalized support in their learning experience.Compared with students who learned programming before, those who never learned programming might find high level of peer pressure. Giving those beginnerspersonalized support can motivate them further to get over the threshold and have a better learning experience.
Insight 05 >>
Trouble shooting in programming is time consuming because students, especially novice, need personalized feedback.There are numbers of potential bugs and tiny errors that prevent students from getting the answer right. In this way, giving students personalized feedback on their coding can help them correct these errors and get a better understanding of coding.
Reframe the problem
...How might we provide students with personalized and sufficient support in the class?
> In class context
According to research, we decided to focus on in-class learning context and tried to provide sufficient support so that students can spend less time on programming courses after class.
> Personalized and sufficient support
As teachers are unsubstitute resource to support personalized learning in the class, we tried to optimize their time and energy so that they are able to support students individually.
Targeted class settings
Though recognized students as one of our target users, we realized that teachers are the most important source to provide support. The more we helped teachers, the better students can learn in the class.
A typical programming class include two parts: lecture from teacher and project-based in-class practices. We then decided to follow the trends and developed three main scenarios for our product - lecture, project and summary.
Ideation
Match research with ideation
In order to provide students with personalized and sufficient support, we brainstormed 15 ideas initially from both teachers’ and students’ perspectives to meet their needs. We also conducted three rounds of speed dating with 11 teachers and students to validate their needs and iterate on ideas.
7 ideas from various perspectives
In the last version (version 04), we finalized 7 ideas and develop these ideas in details with the basic screens, logic flows, design and learning principles and how they match with users needs.
Showcasing the 7 ideas in spring presentation, we analyzed feedback from the client, CMU professors and target users based on their feasibility in development, creativity in resolution and impact on users and business. We decided to combine Supportive Classroom (from students’ side) and Real-time Analytical Dashboard( (from teachers’ side) as our final design direction.
> Supportive Classroom
A facilitative system that leverages scaffolding and multiple sources of help to guide students to finish in-class tasks.
> Real-time Analytical Dashboard
A dashboard that allows teachers to monitor students’ engagement and performance analytics.
Build the system from scratch
Based on the selected resolutions, we decided to design on both teachers’ and students’ side. Considering the limitation on time, we mapped out the whole ecosystem before started and prioritized scenarios that we would like to work on. I was responsible for the Practice Monitor Dashboard and Dual Mode Practice System.
> Practice Monitor Dashboard
Students practice progress and performance will be recorded on the dashboard. Teachers are able to understand students’ working progress and status so that provide them with better support.
> Dual Mode Practice System
In-class practice session, students are able to 1) choose different modes in the practice session. They can either follow the smaller steps to solve the project, which is step mode; or think on their own, which is classic mode; 2) Get personalize feedback from the system; 3) Raise hands and ask teachers for help.
Iteration
In order to test the usability of design, we had 4 rounds of prototying and iterations with 14 teachers and 7 students before getting to the final design. I mainly focused on the iteration in the in-class practice session.
