A lot has happened over the past three and a half months. We showed off Curri, tested it and talked to students, teachers, school administrators, education researchers, edtech advisors, business people, lawyers, family and friends. We learned a lot on both a personal and professional level.

Our goal was to build a product that solves a meaningful problem and we knew that in order to do that we had to set our egos aside and focus on learning. We knew we had to truly listen to what people were saying, to take their problems seriously and be passionate about them and their problems, NOT the solution that we were proposing.

Originally Curri was composed of 3 components; a curriculum map, self-assessment with analytics and a help queue. The app was pilot tested at HackerYou’s full-time course for the full duration of the course (9 weeks). We gathered a lot of data and gained insights into how people were using the app. The 27 students and four instructors provided us with invaluable insights throughout the pilot into why they were (or were not) doing certain things.

A living roadmap

Early feedback from the students showed us that they appreciated having a map of the learning expectations for each lesson but it was a “nice have” rather than a “must have”. Many people (students, teachers, advisors, etc.) also pointed out some flaws in the idea that were hard to get around. The map was perceived to be too time consuming to build and teachers felt that their plans were too fluid to fit into a map.

It was a hard sell because people want instant utility with software, and they need it to fit into their workflow. Sign up, set it up in a couple of minutes and get results. If they’re paying for software then it needs to make their life easier, not harder.

Self-assessment

Many students told us that they really enjoyed the self-assessment component of the app - the time dedicated to reflection was helpful. We dissected the usage data and had many conversations with students and teachers. We also had a great conversation with a researcher who is doing work in this field.

We learned that students need a lot of guidance about how and when to self-assess. Success criteria are not enough for proper self-assessment, students need to complete a task first (e.g. do an exercise). We also found that students don’t necessarily struggle with the building blocks (which in Curri we called “checkpoints”) but in fact they struggled with putting these checkpoints together to build something real. This meant that we needed a much more robust solution.

Queue

The one component that was universally loved was the help queue. Students could easily get into the queue and continue doing what they were doing until an instructor was free to help them out. Teachers loved it because they got a better sense of how many people needed help and were better able to coordinate their efforts. On some days the queue was used more than 80 times – some would get into the queue at 6 am in the morning! When we spoke to students they told us that on many occasions the queue “saved the day” for them. We also learned that students were eager to help each other and group together so we knew that we could give them more with the help queue. It was a simple solution to a big problem with a lot of potential.

We have decided that the queue will be the core feature that we build our product around. HelpCue is our new product which takes the queue to the next level. The next blog post will talk about the help queue in more detail.