Histobox
Feb 2020
A tool designed to assist all educators from middle school teachers to college professors in creating an engaging and interactive lesson plan.
Histobox was created in the College + A&E Networks Creative Jam and awarded 5th place out of 55 teams nationally.
TLDR;
Challenge
Based on the Gallup Student Poll survey, student engagement is dropping each school year. Students have been forming a higher dependency on memorization instead of genuine learning.
Other teaching tools such as Chronozoom, which is similar to Prezi, allow users to create multilayer, interactive timelines; however, the interface is confusing, unprofessional, and lacking cohesiveness. We created Histobox to consolidate the teaching needs of users by simplifying the process of planning lessons and figuring out how to engage their students.
Our challenge was to design and prototype a HISTORY Channel mobile application in collaboration with A&E Networks that provides an engaging, easy-to-use tool for both teachers and students to interact with.
Results
Histobox placed 5th out of 55 teams across the US. It is expected to greatly reduce the time taken for teachers in creating lesson plans by automating research and addressing state standards while planning.
Teachers will also be able to select options from a list tailored to their lesson plans instead of spending hours looking for suitable information to plan from or recycling the same plans every year.
Process
Research & Analysis:
Since this project had a 24-hour time constraint, our team quickly brainstormed ideas on a collaborative document, then created a short questionnaire for two interviews we planned to conduct in order to get a realistic understanding of the problems teachers faced.
One of our interviews was crucial in gathering firsthand information about the issues with lesson planning, productivity, and the best methods that have worked to keep students engaged.
From this data, we began loosely planning our wireframes to address the problems from the prompt and the interviews.
Defining Business Questions:
After reviewing the brief as a team, we came up with two questions to keep in mind while designing this application:
~ How can we design a tool for a range of middle school to college teachers that assists them in creating an engaging and interactive History lesson plan?
~ How may one choose from a repository of videos and online articles and use them in lesson plans, projects, and presentations?
Wireframing and Prototyping:
In order to simulate how the app would work as closely as possible in the wireframing stage, our team collected images and information from the HISTORY Channel’s website to include. We also opted to design responsive animated assets, such as a custom loading screen, to transition between components.
The two key features of this application are the lesson plan creator and the interactive classroom games. Based on the teacher’s state-specific teaching standards and what time period and civilization they will be teaching, our app will recommend the best videos that match the teacher’s needs.
Classroom games will also be recommended to the teacher based on their selected criteria. The interactive classroom games, such as trivia or class adventure, will be generated based on the chosen video.
Outcomes
Gamifying “Boring” Subjects can Encourage Deeper Learning
Our app integrates HISTORY’s deep catalog of video content and interactive games to not only help students learn lessons based on state-specific teaching standards, but also have an enjoyable classroom experience.
Histobox is expected to reduce the time taken for teachers in creating lesson plans by automating research and addressing state standards while planning.
The HISTORY Channel app will recommend a variety of engaging teaching resources, such as videos and games, based off of region and time period. Teachers will be able to select options from a list tailored to their lesson plans instead of spending hours looking for suitable information to plan from or recycling the same plans every year.
This project placed 5th out of 55 teams overall in the College + A&E Networks Creative Jam.
