A New-Age Student’s Digital Diary

7 min readNov 9, 2018

Objective

To visualize a digital diary that’s personalized and built around each student in order to help them do more in the class.

User research

I targeted students aged between 14 –18 years(Standard 8th to 12th) as these years are the most monumental in a student’s career, to shape her interests and niche. According to my research, I broadly categorized students into three different performance indexes in a class:

🥇 Top performer (top 5% of the class)

Myra Banik, a student of class 9th, is a consistent performer. She sits in the front row, known for interacting with teacher with a curious stance. Her ability to learn fast coupled with devotion to academics land her in the top 3% of the class. On a personal level, she is friendly and doesn’t mind sharing tips or notes with friends.

Anxiety: 🤯 / 5

Peer pressure: 🗣 / 5

Willingness to learn: 🧠 🧠 🧠 🧠 / 5

Average performer (top 30% of the class)

Kshitij Lawrence, a student of class 8th, resolves to the last-minute effort during exams or tests. Known to a have a good mind, often ends up distracted in thoughts during lectures. On the flip side, he is good at sports and extracurricular. He is friends with pretty much the entire class partly because he has a way with people.

Anxiety: 🤯 🤯 🤯 🤯 / 5

Peer pressure: 🗣 🗣 🗣 🗣 /5

Willingness to learn: 🧠 🧠 / 5

Low performer (below 70% of the class)

Harmeet Deol, a student of class 10th, struggles to complete his assignments on time. His bad scores in Monday Tests put him in a bad eye of teachers. He could mug things but, formulas and chemical reactions are his nightmares. His tries to memorize mathematical solutions without understanding the logic behind them, in order to score marks. He doesn’t have many friends to get support or clear his doubts.

Anxiety: 🤯 🤯 🤯 🤯 /5

Peer pressure: 🗣 / 5

Willingness to learn: 🧠 🧠 🧠 / 5

Problems identified

• lack of proper planning makes the journey erratic and stressful
• no focus on skills such as teamwork, personality development and public speaking ❗️
• depression and bullying ❗️❗️
• hesitance to interact with the teacher.
• theoretical emphasis on subjects over practical learning.
• same teaching approach irrespective of individual capabilities.

Non goals/what I don’t intend to do

❌ To digitize teaching experience as teachers cannot be replaced by AI/AR/VR.
❌ To gamify learning and dehumanize students based on just grades.
❌ To bombard a student with all the content that he ‘should’ learn.

Connecting the dots..

Student use cases

✍🏼 Uses platform to study
📝 make notes during class
📚 refer to books during class
🗓 refer to time table and schedule
☝🏻 ask doubts during class or online
📌 plan her tasks proactively
⏱ take tests
🔎 evaluate and analyse her performances

A new age curriculum and class room model

User flow

The solution- Almanac

An additional 1 hour long period everyday in school, where students explore concepts, plan their day and overlook the status of their studies. Here are the highlights:

• Home where a student can explore different concepts, assignments, chapters, tasks and subjects that she needs to work on.

• Personal dashboard where widgets can be customized based on events in school.

• Notifications to announce events in school such as important dates of exams and functions

‘I’m stuck’ feature to counter depression and bullying 🚨

‘I’m stuck!’ is present on all screens at all times.

When a student is frustrated, depressed or angry, this can help her with a quick resolve.
It is context aware, and senses the topic or chapter a student is learning. It sources the data to show the most asked doubts to the user.
Depression: ‘A student commits suicide every hour in India’. This issue needs to be solved by taking a proactive approach of guidance by an experienced counsellor. If proper advice is served at initial stages, the condition would not worsen. For smaller age group, the same can be represented as a Superhero, so that they confide in them and open up about their worries.
Bullying: This issue prevails in most of the schools in India. A simple action to report any misconduct by the press of a button can help. Parents can also be intimated to take quick action.

Planned Tasks based on timeline to avoid last minute studying and stress

Introducing Pre-Class to experience maximum learning for slow learners

This section consists of small videos coupled with questions to give students a jump start and experience maximum learning in their upcoming classes. Time tag such as ‘‘15 min task’’ signifies an instant go-to action for students to take.

Learning suggestions based on class activity and upcoming tests

Learning in a teams of high, medium and low performers (Based on an experiment)

Experiment: Grade 8th students were divided into two classes- A & B.
• Class A was taught a concept by a teacher.
• Class B was divided into teams, each consisting of- 1 high performer, 1 average performer and 1 low performer. Teams were made to self explore a concept. Class B was then given a material.

CLASS B- HIGH, MEDIUM AND LOW PERFORMERS IN A TEAM

Thereafter, both classes were assessed based on a test. Class B was assessed both individually and as teams. It was observed that Class B performed better in teams as the high performers pushed other members of team to learn more. Also, as a result of self study, students were able to retain more content and understand better. Students were able to communicate more with their peers.

This widget recommends groups to a student based on the above algorithm. This should also instil teamwork, better communication, leadership among students.