Endeavor

As my capstone project for my Masters in Educational Technology and Applied Learning Science (METALS) program, my team, EvolvEd, consulted with Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (HMH), a leading company in educational content and technology, to improve their reading intervention program. We researched the current state of the software for struggling readers, proposed product concepts for the next version of the program, and prototyped and tested an interactive storytelling game, Endeavor.

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (HMH) tasked us with investigating ways to improve their reading intervention software to prepare for its next iteration. For the first four months of the project we researched the software's usability using heuristic analysis, types and levels of personalization using adaptivity analysis, how students actually use the software using interviewing and contextual inquiry, trends in student learning using log data analysis, and how rivals stack up using competitive analysis. We synthesized our research findings using affinity diagrams, classroom models, personas, and learning journeys and pulled out insights from them. We then used the insights to propose product concepts to HMH and work with our client to narrow the scope of our prototype.

During our spring product idea meeting with the client, we specified a shortcoming in the program that we could address. Students who are placed into this reading intervention software are very far behind in reading level, and receive instruction and practice starting at the very basics of reading: phonics (mapping sounds to letters). However, while the program does a good job of teaching the fundamentals of reading, students are still overwhelmed when they have to read lover passages of multiple sentences. We decided to focus our solution on helping students become comfortable reading longer passages, keeping them motivated and engaged, and identifying errors that they made while reading.

Once we settled on a direction, the last three months of the project were dedicated to prototyping, testing, and refining our product. We worked in two-week design sprints, starting with determining our goals for that sprint, and delegating tasks to team members. For the next week and a half, we created storyboards, wireframes, low- to high-fidelity prototypes, and further analyses as necessary to inform the prototypes. We ended our sprint with user testing to determine our prototype's usability, engagement, accountability, and learning efficacy. We ended the sprit with a retrospective, which decided how we would change our process and direction for future sprints.

Our final product is Endeavor, an interactive storytelling game. Students read passages and choose their way through an adventure, which gives them autonomy in their learning journey and personalizes their experience. Comprehension and decoding assessments are embedded within the narrative and identify the types of errors and level of errors students make. We wrote a compelling narrative and combined it with key visuals and interactivity to keep students engaged and motivated to continue reading the story. The text can leveled for different reading abilities and students can request difficult passages to be read out loud, making Endeavor appropriate for students at all stages of the reading intervention software. The content covered in the assessments was chosen from the most difficult skills as identified by log data analysis from the existing software.

In handing off our designs to HMH, we hope that they will incorporate our activity into the new flow of the software. We handed off not only our visual design guidelines and code for our prototype, but also a process for creating new narrative that fit the structure of our prototype, to make it easier for HMH's content writers to write new stories. We also hope that they will integrate more features from our backlog, such as rewards that persist between stories, and more immediate correctness feedback.