Judges Choice: My Class Buddy | Taking the stress out of home learning for students, teachers, and families.

What is the problem you found?

Children and families feeling stressed from trying to juggle school tasks and manage daily schedules online every day. I would like to help take the stress out of keeping up to date with school tasks at home while learning remotely. My design will help teachers to be able to answer kids questions anytime during the day.

Step 1: Survey for students, teacher and families

Design thinking process part 1: I made a short survey to understand the needs of home-schooled kids:

Survey questions: https://forms.gle/xkesx9pcg1Cc5TPV9 

Step 2: Design thinking process part 1.2: Empathy map to show the needs of the users

Step 3: Design thinking process part 2: Define - Personas: finding pain points and challenges

Step 4: Ideation

I knew what I wanted to do with the kids voice experience but I had to do more brainstorming about the ways the teacher would use My Class Buddy to get daily updated information to the students. Firstly I thought they would just talk into the Alexa as well, but that would take ages for the teacher, so I decided to make an app for easier use. The teacher simply chooses an assignment, how many students they want to set for and then it's ready. I did a lot of ideation around the design of the app and what screens the teacher would need. Here are a few drawings I tried.

 

What is your opportunity?

How might we make learning in the home fun, enjoyable, easy, and stress-free?

Who is your audience?

Students, their teachers, and their families.

What Is Your Solution?

A voice app for teachers and students that makes learning at home fun and interactive using platforms such as Alexa or Google assistant. This will help students with reminders and subject instructions so that they can manage their time independently and always know what they are supposed to be doing. It will also contain check-ins for mental health, overwhelm, exercise and social connections with friends.

The teachers also use a regular visual My Class Buddy app on a phone or tablet to get the information into the Alexa database, for kids to access. They can also use the voice app to add tips about subjects, set their teacher name and add personal messages.

A decision tree that shows how the Alexa skill works. I used an online program to make a decision tree, and after a lot of work, this is the final product. 

Support Required

Connections

Connections to mentors in Voice Design technologies to help me learn more coding skills to make the product better. I'd like to get a bigger interactive voice screen so I can work out how to make voice apps that use the touchscreen too. 

Funding

I would like to pay for a professional website so that I don't have to have "weeblysite" in the web address, and I'd like money to launch this as a real product and advertise it to schools and families.

Advice

Business advice to learn how to launch this as a real product. How to move from idea to making my prototype a real product.

Development

I would like to talk to Voice Design developers so that I can develop my product and learn more about coding voice technologies, such as how to make the conversation more human-like, less like a robot and make it stop saying dot all the time. I think I'd like to be a technology inventor so I would love their help and mentoring to help me create great products. I'd like to get to know mentors who are willing to help with my ideas.