An interactive learning adventure designed to boost children's proficiency in math through gamification.
Role
UX Designer & Researcher
Team
3 Designers
5 Developers
Tools
To Infinity & Beyond
Addventures was conceived, designed and deployed by a cross-functional team of eight over a three day hackathon. With multiple members guiding a small child through early math, we loved the idea of a simple, approachable app that might aid little ones in number recognition, addition and subtraction.
The games we designed for Addventures are aimed at kids age 4-6 who are just discovering math. We chose a space theme to create an expansive and adventurous story backdrop for our game. Like the vastness of space, Addventures wants to help little ones count, add & subtract to infinity and beyond!
A Little Insight
With limited time to conduct research on a three day sprint, we were lucky to get an interview with a 5 year old who gave us some great insights.
We asked about the games they love, how they play them, what makes them fun, and how they feel about winning and losing.
Pint-sized Persona
This is Rodrigo, a kindergartner who struggles to concentrate on math in school. His main frustrations are similar to his main goals: learning the difference between 6 & 9, and avoiding bedtime.
Keeping a target user in mind helped us continually center the needs and goals of school age children. Typical design discussions asked W.W.R.D: What Would Rodrigo Do?
Competitive Analysis
From a competitive analysis of Prodigy Math, Gogo Math and Duolingo Math we assembled a list of features to consider for Addventures.
For our MVP we decided to target rewards for achievement, play with friends, quests and gameplay streaks.
User Flow
Building out a user flow helped us quickly establish how the app should work. It's easy to lose track of functionality without this crucial step.
Initially this flow moved to gameplay faster, until we considered that our target users might need parental assistance to read onboarding prompts.
Ideate+Prototype+Test
Between initial sketches and low, mid and high fidelity prototypes, usability testing provides valuable keys to feature prioritization, color palette, navigation and more.
Our testing identified the need to add labels for the nav bar icons and universe map games, and to build out a personalized learning experience option for the demo.
Testers wanted to get a sense of what the personalized learning experiences could look like, so we quickly built out a new portion of the flow for high fidelity.
Expanding the Flow
Style Guide
Color Palette
An exciting, playful palette, using shades of purple, orange and blue to evoke creativity, adventure, learning, and the vastness of space.
Typography
Nunito is a friendly sans serif font with rounded edges that really matched the curious young learner voice of our product.
Backgrounds
Attractive space-themed backgrounds help users feel they are traveling the cosmos on a learning adventure.
Blast Off with Addventures
Come explore Addventures! Our high fidelity prototype shares a taste of the exciting games and features awaiting young math learners. This MVP shoots for the moon and charts a course for fun!
Featuring a starting line up of avatar building, gamified early math learning, rewards for achievements and learning goal tracking, we hope to help little learners blast off into math skills!
Next Mission
Team Addventures saw a huge range of possible applications for our product that there simply wasn't enough time to research and implement in the short span of a hackathon.
Addventures V 1.0
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Early Math Learning
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Avatar Building
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Achievement Rewards
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Learning Goal Tracking
Given time, we would love to service a wider range of grade level math, and dive into math concepts such as shapes and geometry, negative numbers, and of course: infinity.
Future Features
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Wider Range Grade Level Math
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Shapes, Geometry
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Negative Numbers, Infinity