Must-read articles when designing an online learning platform for kids🙇🏽♂️📖
These articles📝 will help you understand what to keep in mind before you start to design for kids.
The demand for Digital Learning continues to grow rapidly worldwide, especially after the Coronavirus pandemic hit us. Pioneers in Edtech Industry are trying their best to help make Online Learning accessible for everyone so no child has to miss on learning.
With so much happening, The biggest challenge is to recreate offline learning experiences online. Through Offline medium(schools, tuitions etc), it is much easier to learn, clarify doubts, socialize with peers etc than trying to build it online as it brings its own operational and technical constraints.
We at our company, are also in the process to design an Online Learning platform and we are in our initial phase of learning more about kids, their behaviour and how should we design something to cater for the needs of all age students. So during our self-research, we came across many references which helped gained essential insights before we even started designing. Sharing a few of them here.
Designing Exceptional Remote Learning Experience for Young Children
Rachel Dixon, a lower school director, writes this article about how in Rossman School, teachers came together to improvise remote learning experiences.
Some very obvious points she mentioned in her words as:
1.“the older the student, the greater the ease of transition in managing remote learning.”
2. “We know that young children thrive and grow in environments that allow for hands-on and in-person exploration, trial and error, and learning opportunities. They build and deepen their understanding of relationships through close interaction, physical touch and the ability to directly observe the reactions of others. These are not experiences that readily lend themselves to a screen.”
So to tackle the Screen problems, what teachers in Rossman school assured were the following points:
Consistency & Routine
- Creating a Structure & Predictable Routine. For example: by giving in calendars, being consistent with calling out “Star of the week”.
Exploration & Hands-On Opportunities
- The theoretical approach would not entice students much to a level that encourage them to be attentive or even creative much. Adopting a Practical Approach, Helping kids utilize the “at home” environment to very best can encourage and help them involve in learning.
Differentiation & Small Group Work
- Scheduling some small group classes, or Doubt classes gives support after long instructional classes. To help students individually understand topics that they might not be able to pick up due to their own pace of learning.
Small group learning opportunities were one of our most critical pieces to instruct, support and evaluate learning.
Joy
- Celebrating childhood
Relationships
- One-to-one Encouragement
Article Link:
Cognitive Considerations when Designing for kids
To define why it is essential to keep in mind the cognitive abilities of different aged groups users while designing for kids especially, this article from Nielson Norman Group explains Piaget's Development Theory.
Piaget’s Development Theory
According to Jean Piaget, kids’ cognitive ability to reason, infer and make connections is still developing. That development happens in different stages:
The preoperational stage (children between the ages of 2 and 7):
- Use symbols to represent objects
- Struggle to understand other people’s perspectives.
- Language skills are still developing.
The concrete operational stage(between the ages of 7 and 11):
- Kids learn how to use logic to make inferences and reason about the world.
The Formal Operational Stage ( ages 12+)
- Young adults start to think more abstractly and reason about hypothetical problems.
The Article provides Design Recommendations :
- Give kids clear and specific instructions by stating the goal of Online Tasks and how to achieve it
- Instructions should be tailored to the kids’ level of understanding.
- Use existing mental models and knowledge about the world to help kids accomplish tasks
- Reduce cognitive load by designing self-explanatory interfaces and preventing possible errors
- Instructions should be clear and specific, but not too prescriptive.
Article Link:
Designing For Kids vs Designing for Adults
A UX researcher, designer, and strategist in the field of interactive children’s media, Debra Gelman in her article states that Designing for Kids & Designing for Adults is a lot different than it seems. Even designing an app or site for a 3 years old might not be the same as designing for a 6-year-old, as kids change pretty quickly.
Key Differences between Kids & Adults :
- Challenge
- Feedback
- Trust
- Change
Key Similarities between Kids & Adults:
- Consistency
- Purpose
- Surprise
- Lagniappe
Article Link:
Listening to what Participating User(Teacher) have to say
As UX Designers, we understand the importance of what actual user pain points are or what they have got to say about their problems. This article by India Today exactly talks about that. India today published a blog in its Education Today section about how Tutor’s are dealing with Online Classes and their observations in General.
Here are some methods quoted by the teacher to ensure a good learning experience for kids:
- “Teacher shares subject wise weekly tasks like assignments, videos & other reference materials to students through google drive. She conducts live classes through meet.google.com where students can join during the schedule given earlier. Through this, she shares documents, presents all materials and communicates through chat box during the meet.”
- “To reinforce a routine, the teacher has created a calendar event using Google calendar in which she fixes classes for a week. Every week’s sessions will be notified to students through email”
- “She records the sessions which allow the students to review the sessions later. She uses ‘bitpaper.io’ as their virtual whiteboard.”
- “To assess students’ understanding and progress, the teacher conducts oral Q&A session during the online classes, which are helpful to get some clarity on their prior knowledge and to what extent the students have completed the work.”
Major Challenges quoted by the teacher:
- A lot of preparatory work must be done by the teachers before they give a study plan or conduct online sessions. She is unable to see students’ work visually to get an idea of where they are struggling.
- She feels that during live classes, few students are hesitating to reply giving excuses about technical faults with the system.
- As teachers, they were used to respond to a lot of non-verbal cues, which used to be valuable informal feedback.
Article Link:
My Key Takeaways for our product from the above resources:
Keeping Age Group in Mind.
When designing for Kids in Age 2 -7, Age 7–11 and Age 12+, it is important to keep their cognitive abilities in mind.
Defining consistency and Routine for Students for any Age Group is important.
Tackling challenges like how to help students convey doubts/communication visually so tutor can pick up those cues better.
Differentiating with long Instructional Videos and Small Group Works.
The most important & challenging point to make any learning experience best is building tutor & Student end to end relationships.
Let me know in the comments if this article helped you gain any insights if you are also designing for kids.
Thank you for reading 😊
