Project: Skills Wheel
Problem Overview
Inclusive Classrooms is a non-profit helping teaching assistants (TAs)
monitor kids’ social aptitudes and progression.
Before we came in, the teachers filled in 'skills wheels' manually
and data was manually inputted into spreadsheets - so our task was to
make the process digital, with an output that would make life easier
for people analysing the results. (Lightening the load for good causes
is what we live for!)
Approach
We had to think hard about designing a system that involved a simple
and friendly questionnaire, super simple data collection & storage,
and easy-to-use analysis tools on a very small budget.
We problem-solved together to find the simplest possible MVP:
design, a simple data entry form and drawing the ‘skills wheel’,
a visual representation of the data for the TA.
When a second round of funding came in a year later we sat together
to workshop what the evolution of the application could be, both in
terms of design and features (logging in, historical skills wheels,
admin dashboard) based on a year’s worth of usage by TAs.
Solution
Others can reinvent the wheel, especially with time a factor:
dwyl has a wealth of open source work to draw on, so that’s where
we started.
Using a tutorial we’d written previously, we quickly
developed a solution for saving data not just to our database
(for future use) but directly into a Google spreadsheet for access
until there was time and funding for an admin dashboard.
We used D3.js to create engaging “skills wheels” - visual
representations of the data both current and historical, and
everything else was done with our Elixir stack. We added PDFs for
download and an admin dashboard to allow specific school domains to
be granted access to the application and TAs to manage their students
& groups.
Key Functionality
- Data collection through intuitive and beautifully-designed interface for teaching assistants
- Simple visualisations of all data collected for each child for teaching assistants
- Administration functionality to view, filter and download data collected
- Admin functionality limiting the email addresses of those who could log in (preferred to enforcing registration)
- Utilisation of a dwyl open-source module to automatically save data into a Google spreadsheet
- Data was backed up to a redis database to allow for future expansion of the app
- 100% automated tests
- Continuous delivery
- PDF downloads implemented using open source module html-pdf
- Deployed to Heroku during development
Technologies
Project Length
6 Weeks
Feb 2016 - Feb 2016 (Sprint 1)
Mar 2017 - Mar 2017 (Sprint 2 - 3)*
* Additional sprints are commissioned to build
further functionality based on user feedback
Implementation Team
QA Code reviewer
2 Developers
UX/UI Designer
Scrum master