Keep your students on track with AiBuddy!
Team Members: Phillip Tran, Nicoletta Gilbertson, Ray Fung, Alex McGregor
Our user research has identified a need for helping young elementary school students stay focused and motivated in class. It is much more difficult for teachers to teach online to younger students, so much so that class sessions are sometimes shortened because the kids cannot pay attention for too long in an online setting. This is especially true for students who do not have a designated room or quiet space to focus on their zoom class.
Our solution to these problems is AiBuddy. AiBuddy is a context-driven artificial intelligence helper for students to interact with and earn rewards. It has an easy to use interface so children can quickly get whatever they need from it. The app centers around a voice assistant that can navigate or do anything on the app from any screen. Just say “Hey, AiBuddy,” and it will pop up ready to answer a question or help with school. Additionally, AiBuddy has your student’s back, and recommends things like setting alarms for school and to do homework when the due date is approaching. Staying on track in school will earn the student coins, which they can use to purchase costumes and hats for their AiBuddy, to make it their own! The customizations will show up on the helper throughout the app.
Our first paper prototype with our AiBuddy involved mainly around a central screen where users would be able to interact with the AiBuddy and navigate through the application by directly speaking with the AiBuddy. We believed that our application would make navigation easier by reducing it to just the AiBuddy.
However, it turned out that many of our participants believed that the flow of our application was actually quite confusing. Many participants mentioned that it was confusing having to talk to AiBuddy to navigate, especially since they didn’t even know what they could ask AiBuddy, and what other parts of the application even existed. One of our participants also mentioned that it’d be impossible to use our AiBuddy with the way our system is designed if they were in certain environments, for example, a current class in session. What this meant for us was that we needed to simplify the navigation process of our app. What we believed was simple (navigation through talking) was actually very hard for our users. Thus, we added a navigation bar to the bottom of our app which is universal to almost every single screen of our app. The navigation bar made some of the most important screens of our application accessible via a single button.
After our paper prototype, we had some critical changes that needed to be implemented. The biggest change was an updated home screen that allowed the user to navigate to the other pages of the app easier, as well as being simpler for a student to understand. We also changed the navigation bar so that the middle button would always bring up the AiBuddy interface, so it was accessible from any screen. Another big change was including privacy settings and asking for permissions within the app. This is something that was particularly important to get right, as the app would be interacting with children and we want them and their parents to feel comfortable using the application. We have included a few images below of the home screen, the permissions page, and the AiBuddy pop-up.
Now we’ll walk through a couple tasks that students could accomplish on this app. The first being how to be prepared and ready for school in the morning. The student gets a suggestion from the AiBuddy the night before school to make sure and turn on their alarm for the next morning, or they get pinged to make sure and finish their math homework by the middle of the week. The student also has a list of assignments that are due soon on their app, and a calendar that marks days with something important. The second task is keeping the students engaged through the rewards system. They can earn rewards for things like showing up to school on time every day in the week, or turning in their homework on time. The student can build up coins and then buy items or mystery boxes from the store that they can then customize their AiBuddy with. The AiBuddy will be unique to them and it will be a motivator for them to work hard in school, especially during particularly difficult times like remote learning. Below we have two images from each task, the left two being the alarms and homework and the right two being the customization screen and seeing how it would impact your AiBuddy everywhere on the app.
We have identified a need to keep young students focused, motivated, and on top of their schoolwork, especially in online school. We came up with AiBuddy, an app that incentivizes students to participate in class and complete work through rewards. AiBuddy also reminds and organizes students of what they have to get done for class, and when class is. We imagine our solution will make school more fun for elementary school kids, and will encourage them to learn and be more productive without someone telling them as often. This would also help teachers teach their material better if students are more engaged.
Link to our finalized digital mockup:
https://www.figma.com/file/pS8AICkqQOYtgk6sjAkYsb/Prototype?node-id=0%3A1
