Judges Choice: Class Club | An interactive online platform for social learning and collaboration to engage students

What is the problem you found?

One of the biggest problems teachers are having is keeping their students engaged with online lessons. The main issues I see as a student are firstly more difficulty participating in lessons and secondly the normalcy lost as daily schedules become less established.

What is your opportunity?

How might we find a way to engage students with their learning without face to face learning and social interaction?

Who is your audience?

I think this must be especially hard for younger students with shorter attention spans who are trying to stay focused and enjoy learning when they are home alone especially because the social aspect of schools is a major motivator to participate.

What Is Your Solution?

For my design solution to this problem, I propose an online learning platform; classclub, which brings back the normalcy of the daily school routine. The students will be able to play games and talk with each other in groups and the platform will notify students when a class is about to begin and the teacher will be able to disable the games function during classes. If the state government were to back this idea and implement it for all comprehensive public schools, students would be able to take advantage of the benefits of an established daily schedule, allowing their parents to work from home without constantly needing to supervise or keep their children busy.

This platform, Classclub, will have many features to engage the students. They will be able to create their own avatar which they use to navigate around the virtual school map. This ability for personalisation will act as a form of self-expression which is typically more difficult when using online communication. The platform allows the student to ask the teacher questions at any time of the day by sending a direct message. Their microphone can be muted when they need to go have lunch or for bathroom breaks. When their class is about to begin, they simply click on the school building which will open their video or audio call with the rest of the class.