Card Sorting App
By reducing the massive administrative work normally included for the teacher in creating physical cards, separating the different answers from the students, and counting the statistics by hand, a digital platform simplifies the process of using this teaching principle. The product enables a faster distribution of cards to students since they can log onto the website with their own devices, as well as the possibility for teachers to recycle previous decks and share them among other teachers. Since the product store all the student answers in the same location, the process of getting statistics and an idea of the students' understanding is simplified for the teacher. This teaching phenomenon is a way of "gamifying" the learning process for the students making them more engaged and motivated to perform their best, while still providing the teacher with a great overview over what parts of the subject need more training and what concepts specific students struggle with understanding. By digitalizing the work for the teacher to start utilizing this technique for teaching, the entry barriers currently in place for teachers adopting card sorting as a teaching tool will be reduced. The product also enables flexibility in terms of how the sort of the cards should be in the optimal case, and how to grade the different combinations made based on this optimal sort. The flexibility of the optimal sort creates several different user-cases for the product, since teachers can use it to both test their optimal sort, as well as allow the students to create their own sort and analyze the students understanding behind that sort. This product is a learning tool that provides insight, understanding, and motivation and can be applied in several different settings and fields.
Our clients, Ludo Juurlink & Marie-Jetta den Otter from Leiden institute of Chemistry, are doing research on how children learn. They played the card sort game in physical form, but this takes a lot of time for the teacher. Therefore we created a digital version. We had planned meetings every 2 weeks with the client. During these meetings we showed off our prototype app. We also had contact using email and WhatsApp. The communication was good.
We are a diverse team. With students from all of the computer science courses. None of us had a background in web development. This was a bit of challenge. We started with 6 people, but ended with 5. However the workload that was left, was picked up by the others without too much problems.