Attendance Hero
Hello, Dribble World 👋🏼🏀!
For my first shot I take on a prompt from the Weekly Product Design Exercise by Artiom Dashinsky.
The prompt for this exercise was as follows:
At the beginning of each new semester or school year, teachers are faced with the challenge of remembering names for a large number of new students. Design an experience to help an educator match faces to names, with the goal of shortening the time needed to reach complete un-aided accuracy.
Solution
Attendance Hero helps educators form meaningful connections with their students by reducing the time it takes to accurately recognize their names and faces. This is accomplished through repeated exposure to photos and names of students, using methods like visual attendance taking that highlights each individual student, and engaging memory games that aid in associating names with faces.
Goals
While the main goal for Attendance Hero is for teachers to reach unaided accuracy of recognizing their students, another underlying goal was to provide an educator with a tool that would fit seamlessly into their day to day workflow, and avoid adding tasks that felt tedious to their already busy days. It was important to identify areas in a teacher's workflow and schedule where existing tasks or procedures could be leveraged as opportunities for learning, instead of trying to force these tasks in.
Schedule & Attendance
The schedule tab shows an overview of the educator's day including current and upcoming classes. They can tap into classes to see which students are in it, and if a class has started or is about to start, they can take attendance.
The attendance feature in the app is one of the main methods in assisting educators build the association with names and faces of the students. The hypothesis here is that repetitive exposure to a student's face and name will help the educator commit that student to memory faster. This works better than the standard attendance procedures, as often when teachers take attendance they are either looking for a quick hand up or an audio cue (e.g. here/present) from the student, which they then mark down. In larger classrooms it may be hard to get a good look at a students face, or the teacher may just listen for the cue. This solution puts the student front and center for the teacher, giving them the opportunity to really study the face and name and connect it to the student in the classroom.
Challenges
The second component to helping educators achieve the goal of name and face recognition are the challenges. These are quick and engaging memory games that a teacher can play at their desk while their students work, or during any periods of down time. Games like matching names to faces or unscrambling a students name aid in building that association.
Considerations
This was a challenge from the Weekly Product Design Exercise by Artiom Dashinsky. Given these come out each week, I wanted to give myself the constraint of completing the exercise before the next one was issued.
Because of the short timeline, I was only able to conduct very quick high level research, and make a few assumptions when thinking about a solution for the prompt.
Assumptions made:
Demographic: Educators of middle-school to high school students with classes ranging from 20-30 students
Schools would have a database with student photos and names that would be fed in to the product so the teacher would not have to worry about setting that up
Attendance is a universal practice that all educators conduct on a daily basis, therefore a tool that facilitates this process would make it more likely for them to use and help them achieve the underlying goal of face and name recognition
Repetition and exposure would help commit names and faces to memory faster
Memory games are the best way to make achieving the goal more engaging
With more time I would dive deeper into how we commit things to memory, and what methods if any teachers currently using to help them solve this problem.