The problem: many schools were closed and children were homeschooled. Most schools were not prepared for this problem and solutions on how to get this done vary, and this results in some kids having trouble in the new learning environment. Among troubles we have: getting easily distracted, anxious, not motivated.

Target audience: Children from primary school (ages from 5 to 11 years old), Finland chapter. This is intended to spread to other countries as project grows.

My Role: I was invited to  be UX designer, art support, design product support for the first stage of the project, to participate in a Hackathon for covid19. Research was not part of my job in this project. 

I worked with a team composed as follows: Team lead and developer, two content creators, one game developer, three users/intended audience (parents from children in primary school).

Time constrains:  We had to get done at least wireframes of how the project would work. We had 3 days to get this done.

* The Lead from our project interviewed three potential users of this application, all of them parents working from home.

* The template used, given the few resources in time and users was Lean Persona, the elements within this template are enough to cover all the information required for the project.

* Pain points are the most valuable information outcome from the interviews. These details cannot be share fully because this project is in progress and cannot be fully disclosed, NDA.

* Even though our expected users are the students themselves, they would depend on their tutors/parents to do authentication in the application and the installation or setup of games.

From the pain points coming from users, the content creators and leader worked in task flows, focused mainly in the main user: parent of the children.

Insight: all the pain points related to behavior of children due to the lock down which are:

*Being anxious.

*Being distracted.

*Being not motivated to learn the lessons.

This could be addressed through gamification or interactive games. Analyzing these pain points we found an opportunity feature: Converting assessment from lessons and lessons in mini games.

We asked the following questions:

Q: Who will play the games? 

A: The children

Q: Who will select the games and verify the content is related to the lesson and also safe for children? 

A: The teacher 

Q: Who will provide the games?

A: Game developers looking to gain experience, recommended by their universities.

Q: What platform will the application run?

A: In a desktop. Mobiles are associated to distraction and lack of concentration, then, as children are spending more time at home and very distracted, sitting down in a desktop they will be able to focus attention on the tasks requested.

Besides the Parent-child user other actors/users and their needs came into scene:

* Teachers, the ones who request games for the lessons, the ones who setup what games will be for what lessons and for how long.

* Game developers, the users that will create the games according to requirements.

Sketches in paper and power point were created. The team focused on content creation directly and decided to use "task flows" instead of user journeys or maps, based in the needs or pain points from our user. Next, you will see some captures of the work during this stage in which the team lead and content creators worked.

With the output of the team, I worked proposing a design for the parent-children user and the features required. 

As output I did User flows, next there is a User flow example for the user parent-children. 

Note: I proposed and suggested introducing a reward-system with edu-coins, but that expanded and complicated the scope of the project and time constraints. It will be considered on next stages of the project.

Next output was wireframes in low fidelity and a prototype in Figma, while I was improving and iterating the features according to feedback of our users, we had 3 as mentioned earlier. 

Picture in the right is the user flow prototyped in Figma, to make usability testing with our 3 volunteers.

At this point low fidelity mockups were enough.

However, the logo from the project, it was carefully designed in coordination with an illustrator  to reflect the nature of the project, foundations in education, reliability and games as an encouragement for students at home. The blue color resembles reliability and technology.

The prototype in Figma was tested by our three users, they had no problems finding where the games per classification.

In other side, we received feedback from the jury of the hackathon and she noted that we'd need to consider GDPR, even more that children would be our main users. The information of the users would be stored for assessment  and to save the progress of children in games and compare grades of students who played the games and students who played less or did not play. This mainly to see the contribution of the games in the educational process online.

We researched what GDPR was about, that the tutor of children would be the one on accepting the terms and conditions of this regulation and that this should be clearly visible from the very beginning of user flow. This is, in the login page. Notice the link added with Privacy Policy and the GDPR lock icon in the bottom left corner.

There was a big progress in terms of the project, three users/actors were discovered along with their user flows: parent-student, teacher, game developer.

User flow and features for main user, the children, were iterated and improved.

We are aware this is a social-educational movement that requires community to get involved, so Team Lead, other team members and myself have been actively getting in contact with Schools and Game developer communities to engage them in this project. 

Here is the link summary from project in Guaana.

Here is the link to IGDA Finland talking about this project, as Samuli got the support from them.

Finally, I wanted to mention that I am participating actively in the first game for primary school in Finland, for Geography, I contributed in the character design and illustration. Below is one of the characters, a daughter dog in primary school :)