Our First Prototype

For our first prototype, we wanted to expand on the area of opportunity around student accountability. Based on our own experiences and an interview with Becca, we thought that self reflection would be a powerful tool to promote student accountability. Becca had discussed a time when she asked students to reflect on their first project and then use those reflections to set personal goals for a second project. She saw measurable improvement both in students reaching their personal goals as well as in the quality of their projects. Based on this idea, Becca had proposed a tool that would promote for student reflection, and then return these reflections automatically before the next milestone (for example, at the start of a new project). We chose to expand on this idea for our first design cycle.

Process

The goal for our team’s first prototype took the form of an app that allowed students to submit a reflection and then receive their reflection back via email at a time designated by the teacher; we envisioned that this would be before a major project, test, or evaluation. Both the teacher and the student could read the reflections at any point.

At first, we decided to make a minimum viable product of a submission page for students, backend storage, and teacher’s page to view students’ submissions. The minimum version of the student’s page had a submission window and name area. We decided that this met our minimum deliverable of just making sure that the teacher could get the reflections without having to give out an email address. The backend simply had to store these reflections for the teacher’s evaluation. The minimum version of the teacher’s page displayed the students reflection and near the bottom only displayed reflections which contained certain words as a primary implementation of possible teacher analytics tools. A future iteration would most likely include automation to send the reflections back to students before a major project or at a prompt from the teacher.

At this point in time, the minimum student page and minimum teacher page are complete, however, the implementation of the backend is still unfinished. As the backend is more complicated to set up and our team does not have prior experience in working with backends, this is not unexpected. Once this is complete, the minimum version of our app should be more or less finished.

The work we have completed so far is located at https://github.com/rifkinni/SchoolShaped

Room for improvement

We also have discussed ideas for how we could improve upon this app in a future iteration. One idea that we would like to incorporate is a method for teachers to respond to and/or give feedback on student reflections that are sent to the students along with their initial reflections. If a teacher decides to respond to reflections in this way, they can emphasize a particular aspect of the reflection that they find important for the student moving ahead. Moreover, it can show the students that the teacher finds the reflections and the student’s growth significant. We believe this would push students to take the reflections more seriously, and therefore make our app and these student reflections more impactful.

We have also discussed implementing tools that allow for deeper analysis of the students reflection on the teacher’s side of this app. Possibilities for these tools include a built-in sentiment analysis tool that allows a teacher to see if a student’s reflection is primarily negative or positive.  This could be used to track overall trends in the entire class’s reflections over time.