Build-A-Brain

As we brainstormed ideas for "Education for All," we thought about our past experiences in school and what we learned through community service tutoring and teaching other students. We remembered that students coming back from summer break struggled significantly with material they had learned the previous year. This kept them from excelling at the start of the school year, hurt their confidence in their subjects, and kept them behind overall.

These thoughts led us to do more research on "Summer Learning Loss." We found that low-income and minority students (two categories that are related) are disproportionately affected by summer learning loss. Parents who are working during the summer are unable to entertain their kids or pay for expensive summer programs. Students spend their summers without exercising their brains, and this is the greatest detriment to their academic performance.

At the same time, expecting any kid to want to spend their summer studying is unrealistic. Spending time with friends building and testing projects, however, is a fun way to spend a few hours in the summer. Since mathematics skills are disproportionately affected by summer learning loss, we thought that incorporating math lessons that lead up to a final project would be a fun way to help preserve the most vulnerable mathematics skills.

We created the website Build-A-Brain to be a platform for students to complete modules that teach them lessons that are relevant to a final project. By having a concrete goal for the lessons to be applied to, the lessons become relevant to the student, and they are more inclined to learn.

Our first concern was which age group to address. We concluded that 5th through 9th graders needed to begin getting more serious about their academic abilities but were still not old enough to be spending summers learning a specific subject. They were the perfect age group because they need to keep their minds engaged without sucking up their "fun-time." Another issue we faced was figuring out how to make the UX/UI as engaging as possible while consideration age and skill level. Our solution was to split the project into varying difficulties, tailored to different grades.

Ultimately, we decided to create a wireframe in AdobeXD because our current coding skills would not enable us to make a website the fully showcased our idea. AdobeXD allowed us to materialize the idea in a way others would be able to understand better. In the future, once we have learned and experienced more, we hope to bring our vision to life in the form of a fully-functional website.

Built With

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• adobexd
• and
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• love
• of
• whole