After we successfully delivered their ‘Phonics’ CD-ROM, educational publisher LCP asked us to develop the next title in their Assessment for Learning range, ‘Assessment for Learning – Maths’.
This comprehensive assessment tool for Primary (Key Stage 2) pupils studying Maths needed to deliver over 4000 carefully-crafted questions addressing the years, strands and objectives from within the Renewed Primary Framework for Maths, and deliver an engaging experience and easy-to-use tool to support the target audience.
As an assessment tool, Assessment for Learning – Maths also needed to support many learners taking a test at the same time and to store all results in one central location for subsequent review and analysis.
Our solution
Our initial usability process of profiling the target audience focused on identifying the key tasks of teachers and learners. For teachers, these included browsing tests and assigning them to classes or individuals, marking tests and reviewing results individually or across a group. The key tasks for learners included performing tests and reviewing their results with teacher comments. Making all of these tasks intuitive and easy-to-use became the principal user experience goals.
We developed a secure online authoring website which enabled LCP to create their own questions and immediately preview them as they would appear in the final application, while we developed the whole of the Flash application in parallel. Running these two processes in parallel allowed the maximum time possible for authoring and verification.
The assessments included a variety of activities, including Multiple Choice, Drag and Drop, Sorting, Grid Activities, Text Entry, Carroll Diagrams and Venn Diagrams, and special focus was placed on ensuring the interactive questions were incredibly easy-to-use, and as engaging as possible to the young students taking the tests.
The questions were brought to life via engaging interactive behaviour, on-screen graphics and animations plus a specially-recorded professional audio track of over 4000 questions and answers, a process which we managed.
The results and analysis section of the product was very important and the user interface created for this allowed the teacher to review and compare results across classes or within a particular class. It can also focusing on a given individual to see their results over different areas of the Maths framework in comparison to other students, as well as drilling down into their exact answers for given questions.