The concept
There are a lot of perks of traditional in-person learning. If there’s one thing we’ve learned during the Covid pandemic, it’s that the intimacy of having your teacher physical with you and available to help you when you need them is priceless. However, there’s also many perks in the digital classroom. Teacher’s can share screen with students and vice versa to ask questions. Students can get instant feedback on their assignments. A lot of the work of grading papers is removed and teachers can focus on the developing better lesson plans.
So how do we make blend the digital with the physical?
The Scope:
Allow teachers connect to multiple Interactive Flat Panels (IFPD) and draw two ways between the IFPD and the lectern.
Have the ability for students and teachers to share between devices.
Teachers can easily create and distribute assignments and get peer reviews.
Students can complete their assignment and get instant results with highlights to where they went wrong.
Teachers can observe from their device to monitor each student hardware connected to ClassFusion
Teachers can manage the classroom group activities from one space.
Allow teachers to record and distribute lectures.
How did we do this?
On the hardware side, Hovercam would build their own computer lecterns and IFPDs. The lecterns would have a 5G wireless transmitter and receiver between the device and the IFPDs. This was great for 2 reasons. First, the connection wouldn’t require wifi. This was beneficial because most K-12 schools share their broadband connection and having ClassFusion in multiple classrooms will throttle the connectivity. 5G tech also works in the nano millimeter wavelength. This means the signal cannot go through walls and interfere with other ClassFusion lectures.
Students would normally be working on laptops, tablets and ChromeBooks. These had particular challenges because they have different hardware specifications. On this end, students will have to use wifi to connect to ClassFusion in order for the teacher to be able to distribute, monitor and help students from his/her teaching station.
On the software side, we had to create 4 different version of ClassFusion – HoverCam’s lectern, IFPD, laptops/ChromeBooks, and tablets. There needed to be a student facing and teacher facing experience as well.
Challenges
Internet connectivity, computer processing, and data storage was the main challenge. When recording the lectures, we had to find a way to store the lessons in bitesize files. We achieved this by creating the ClassFusion Whiteboard. The Whiteboard gave the ability for teachers to design their lesson plans as it was going to be presented and if they choose to record the lesson, all drawings and diagrams would be saved as vectors instead of a video file.
Designing the user’s experience and user’s interface was particularly tricky. Understanding different teaching styles and trying to be accommodating to teachers of all ages. But also catering to the physical needs of students. The experience was in particular tricky. Not just consider the experience of the digital space, but also the physical. How do they like to teach? Do they want to work closely with their students or do they prefer answering questions from their desk? How about the students? Can we make it easier for students to ask questions without feeling embarrassed? How can a student work on the IFPD? Is there a way for them to display their work without actually having to stand up? Can we make this accessible for students with special needs? The questions were endless and each one needed to be considered carefully.
When designing, the UI, we had to build out a proper style guide that was easy, fun, vibrate and easy to use. We had to cater to teachers of all ages and make sure everything was accessible right from the beginning. Because this application has so many features, it needed simple and clear directions from the beginning.
Designing the UX was in particular challenging. We not only had to worry about the interaction between the user and the software, but we also had to keep in mind the hardware around the room. For the ClassFusion whiteboard, IFPDs can range from 50 to 80 inches! A TV that size is great for viewing across the room, but if a 4ft. tall student was to stand at display, trying to reach to the top to write on the display will become challenging. This along with many other scenarios needed to be kept in mind when designing the user experience for the digital and physical classroom.
Beta Testing
Beta testing was on it’s way in a few selective schools in San Bernardino. The middle school build a ClassFusion lab and we donated 6 IFPDs, a digital lectern, ChromeBooks and tablets to test ClassFusion. Students, teachers, administrations saw the potential of ClassFusion and were generally understanding of the bugs, but overall the application worked well. They were thoroughly impressed with the digital whiteboard and casting of lectures across platforms. They had plenty of feedback on what they’d like and how to make their life easier and we brought those feedback back to the office and continue to develop the product.
Lessons learned
Unfortunately, ClassFusion never made it past Beta. There were plenty of lessons learned in this endeavor. Firstly the scope was never fully locked down and it was a huge ask for a startup with only 12 engineers and 2 designers to continue to develop the software, add features, and debug. Leadership unfortunately could not come up with an MVP and we continue to drain funds adding new features with no end in sight. Sadly, we had a working beta that was ready for launch, but leadership’s pursuit of perfection and pleasing every use case caused the product to never came to fruition, and unfortunately the entire project was scrapped and the entire ClassFusion engineering and design team was laid off.