cubic

Intelligent Tutoring System Bridging Learning and Teaching

Problem

The class size in Chinese elementary schools is usually large (more than 50 students), which makes teachers hard to detect and cover student's personal learning needs in the class. Two private Chinese elementary schools are considering to introduce Intelligent Tutoring System (ITS) to the blended class sessions. Since both schools never used ITS before, they want to make sure students' learning experience and other users' experience over ITS match their expectation, and they were interested in the customized design of ITS that fits in their existing teaching system. The schools particularly emphasize the ITS should include parents' needs in terms of understanding their kids' learning progress.

Solution

Cubic, is the prototype that is designed for these two Chinese elementary schools for the blended class sessions of math classes. Due to the time and distance constrains, the user study has to be conducted remotely, including 30 online surveys for teachers, 21 online surveys for parents, 114 paper-version in-class survey for students, and two remote face-to-face teacher interviews using video chat tools. The key focus of the user study is to identify the needs of all the main stakeholders's needs for ITS and get the design implications for the user experience.

The deliverables of the first stage of this project are:

The user study analysis report;
The respective low-fi prototype of the interfaces for students, teachers and parents;
The plan for next steps.

This is my independent study project in the last spring semester. I will be the independent consultant for these two schools in the second stage of this project after this summer.

How it works

The key findings from user study

1. Teachers think ITS should both assist teachers' teaching and enhance students' learning.

2. Parents expectITS can help to personalize the math teaching to adapt to students' characteristics

3. When students get stuck in the exercise and homework, they prefer to ask help from peers rather than from teachers or parents.

The Low-fidelity Prototype

The key user insights from user study are synthesized into the first round prototype design. The interface for teachers is designed for the tablet. The interface for students is designed for the desk-top. The interface for parents is designed for mobile phone.

Teacher Interface (Tablet)

Student Interface (Desktop)

Parent Interface (Mobile phone)

Reflection

I'm a paragraph. Click here to add your own text and edit me. It's easy.