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“When kids can just Google anything,
the best lessons have to be experiential.”

– Middle School Science Teacher

 

PopQuest

An experiential education prototype—mobile first.

2019

My Role

User Research | Wireframing | Prototyping | User Testing 

The Team

Myself + Design Collaborators

Problem Statement

Who:

What:

Why:

Middle & High School teachers.

Need a way to manage the engagement and behavior of their students while on field trips.

Field trips are valuable educational experiences for students that require heavy time and labor investment from teachers.

We will know this to be true by quantitative data collected about Quest completion/engagement and qualitative teacher/pupil feedback.

Competitor Analysis

 

DISCOVERY

There are a number of scavenger hunt apps but few that focus on education. The biggest player in the educational scavenger hunt world is GooseChase. 
 

Strengths
Biggest scavenger hunt app.
First to market.
Well designed desktop site & app.

Opportunities
Can’t create or edit hunts from mobile.
No location-specific hunts.
Lack of facilitator tools for behavior.

Major Opportunity!

Weaknesses
Shared library is weak.
Hard to read descriptions.
Maximum of students per hunt
(free plan).

Threats
Districts may already be invested.
Could seek to buy out competition.
Teachers with bad experiences may not want to try again.

Scavify has a smaller reach but currently offers location-specific hunts at tourist destinations around Philadelphia. They do not have a secondary education focus.

Research Goals

  • Feasibility of a lesson plan involving mobile tech.
  • Value of experiential learning.
  • Difficulties when facilitating experiential learning activities.
  • Barriers to utilizing experiential learning in lesson plans.

Survey & Interviews

 

Generative survey with 21 educators.
60% had facilitated a scavenger hunt.
Data gleaned helped me develop an interview script.

4 phone interviews with diverse educators.
Script was adjusted after the first interview to allow for a more fluid conversational interview.

"

Searching for something is significant. It really helps with remembering.

Special Ed Teacher & Admin
50+ // Female // Retired

"

Teaching today is more about being a cruise ship director than a college lecturer.

MS Science Teacher
30+ // Female // 6 years

"

"

Affinity Map Round 1

R1 Affinity Mapping

Affinity Map Round 2

Round 2
(R3-4 Not pictured)

Affinity Map Round 3

Pulling Out Insights

Affinity Mapping

​

 

After parsing through the interview recordings I conducted multiple rounds of affinity mapping with the digital whiteboard tool Miro. I came to several key insights about my target audience and their issues:

PopQuest SHOULD↴

Experiential learning is a valuable teaching tool HOWEVER it is very time-consuming to plan and exhausting to execute.

1.

Teachers report gamification and competition greatly improves student interest and participation.

2.

Teachers are often hesitant to try new tech because of previous lesson failures or because it took too long to learn.

3.

BECAUSE↴

Business Opportunity

Harnessing the captivating power of mobile technology with the motivational power of competition allows for teachers to shape a hyper-engaging experiential lesson that encourages free exploration of the material. 
The high value and high effort associated with experiential lessons is what makes this a great business opportunity.