Project: High Frequency Words — Adapting Lessons
Development of Inter-Lesson Adaptivity Flow
Academic Skill Focus: High-Frequency Words
User Level: K-2
Problems to Solve: How can we quickly evaluate this skill without wasting instructional time-on-task for those students who have mastered some of the words in the lesson?
Solution: Worked with engineering team (using Agile approach) to develop an instructional flow that includes a “screener” activity which loops into an instructional path only if needed. All previous lesson designs were linear (a student completed activities sequentially). With this new flow, a student could pass the screeners within the lesson (showing they already know the word) and quickly move on to the quiz and ultimately the next lesson without doing unnecessary activities. This new lesson flow of “inter-lesson adaptivity” became the gold standard for all products to ensure students are spending their time focused on skills they have not yet mastered.
Screener into Instructional Routine
Screener Activity
When students did not correctly identify all screener items, they would move into an instructional routine of exposure. High-Frequency Words are often not decodable and therefore need to be memorized in order to recall quickly while reading. The student completes three types of exposures during this loop — “writing” (done digitally as an animation), scanning, and spelling.
Thematic “Skin” Development
Problem to Solve: How do we re-use the same renderers (code) and activity types across every lesson in this product without losing student engagement?
Solution: Develop “skins” which overlay the renderers using the same mechanics but vary the visual design and pay-off animations to give students the feeling of different activities.
Three “skins” were designed using existing backgrounds/rooms on the character’s ship. The lesson intros establishes which space the student would work in and the activities were designed to be “zoomed in workspaces” related to each theme.
Each space used thematic visuals applied to the two skills/parts of the lesson — evaluating words in isolation and evaluating words in context. Satisfying sound design and animations made the activities feel tactile, playful, and easily repeatable.
Example of thematic visual for lab (no sound).
Collection/Reward Moment
The thematic design continued through the use of “reward moments” when a student completed the instruction for a particular word. The pay-off animation revealed their word displayed on a playful ribbon which becomes “collected” and works as a progress moment.
The right ribbon examples show the original artwork and the final artwork after a simplification process where the focus of the reward is more on the word as opposed to the complexity of the ribbon itself.
Reward and collection moment POC (no sound).
Simplified Final Art
