Non-profit EdTech Lab for Research & Innovation.
Engagement Incubation
EduThemes pushes the boundaries of what’s possible with curriculum and online learning, leveraging research and practices to build amazing resources for teachers and students.
- Audience: Teachers and High School Students
- Responsibilities: Research, implementation, and acceleration.
- Tools Used: LLMs, APIs, Adobe Creative Cloud, Python, Node.js, and more.
- Metrics: Currently in testing, but the design speaks for itself.
Highlights
After a massive curriculum development project for a well-known charter school, part of my team was hungry to take the lessons we learned even further. After over a year of iterative design, revision, and compounding growth, we had ended on something truly magical. But we knew we had just scratched the surface. We needed a way break some final barriers and bring innovative, bounding breaking instructional design to students and teachers everywhere. EduThemes was born.
Our goals:
- End teacher burnout.
- Ignite the love of teaching and learning
- Partner with the greatest EdTech people on the planet
Instructional Design
While we are guided by our experience in Agile ADDIE, SAM, Backward designs, standards alignment, Blooms, and others, we allow ourselves to create our own models that are driven by our decades of experience in the classroom, in EdTech, and in emerging research.
Take Quantitown, a Math course designed to reduce dropouts, increase engagement, and slash teacher-prep time. A melody of Universal Design for Learning, Fail-to-Learn, Octalysis Gamification, social learning, storytelling, scaffolding, feedback, UX/UI, and Human-Focused Design for Learning.
Hooks cognitively crafted for engagement
Hundreds of custom images, each aligned to a real-life event, phenomenon, story, or another engaging hook directly related to the content. Regardless of the teacher’s experience, these hooks will connect relevance to the topic.
21st Century School-House Rock
Kids love music. Our research has shown that by adding a catchy tune to the course, students will continue reflecting on the lesson well beyond the classroom. The problem? Music is expensive and time-consuming.
I found a way to bring musical learning to scale with generated AI tunes mixed with proven mnemonics, motivation, and questions to get students thinking deeper about the topic. Don’t be surprised to hear some humming during their final exam!
Feedback-first Design
We developed custom tools to allow us to generate practice sets for kids that give them detailed feedback. Just like a video game, the student instantly knows if they are right or wrong, gets feedback, and can try as many times as needed to succeed. No stress, just flow-focused growth.
Our current research is extending this exciting area to include additional triggers. Adding engagement, motivation, and challenge to parts of learning that would otherwise be drab.
Scaffolding
As a believer in Universal Design for Learning (UDL), I know that we can assume that not every student is prepared or ready for the material. By designing for these students in the margins, we benefit all students.
I am currently researching cost-effective ways to bring scaffolding to scale, allowing for empathetic considerations that subtly guide the student back on track over the course of the year without calling attention to learning differences.
Conclusion
Through data analysis, rapid iteration, and user testing I can take an idea from conception to reality.
