HUZZAH Virtual Classroom

Inspiration

During the COVID-19 worldwide pandemic, our team recognizes that elementary school age children are experiencing social isolation due to the shift from traditional classroom education to pre-recorded task oriented homeschooling. Many older children are attending virtual classrooms by utilizing digital meetings that were primarily designed for business (google meeting, zoom etc.). These virtual forums lend themselves to controlled audiences. Younger children do not have the attention span or capacity to function in those settings. Teachers have been forced to prerecord lessons and assign tasks for elementary school aged children. The parents are now responsible for ensuring lessons are watched and all tasks are completed. While this is a huge problem, we feel that it is the younger children who are being robbed of social interaction that is so valuable for development in learning and society. In essence, young kids miss their friends and are yearning for interaction that helps them engage for their learning.

What it does

We are building an avatar based virtual classroom that allows younger children to participate in lessons as they are being taught. Many younger children are utilizing iPads/tablets in the classroom. We would like to build this as an app that has share screen blackboard functionality. We envision every student would create an avatar that sits in a classroom with the teacher at the virtual blackboard. Each child’s avatar would have the ability to raise their hands and go to the blackboard to speak, complete equations, or answer questions. The teacher would have microphone control during the lesson and decides who is speaking at each time. The teacher could also take control and project lessons full screen on the iPad/tablet during instruction and then back to the virtual avatar environment for interactive lessons. We feel that this classroom virtual environment would give young children benefit of a structured classroom and the opportunity to interact with their peers, thereby combatting social isolation.

How we built it

During the hackathon we refined our idea, branded our vision through animation and graphic design and built our prototype on an adobe click through dummy app. We are proud to present the creation of the HUZZAH Virtual Classroom - which allows students to choose an animal avatar that represents them in the classroom with the teacher at the virtual blackboard. Each child's avatar will have the ability to raise their hand and speak to the class when the teacher calls on them by passing microphone control to them. The teacher can also take control and project lessons full screen for teaching new material and then back to the virtual avatar environment for interactive lessons.

Challenges we ran into

We didn’t have anything ready before the hackathon. It was just an idea that we wanted to develop because we are experiencing the issue first hand with our own children at home. The hackathon provided a compressed timeline- which was a challenge. We had to prioritize what we could design and develop. From a design aesthetic, we were challenged to develop the classroom atmosphere that was engaging without being overwhelming or mirroring a video game.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud to have worked as a team to develop this idea from scratch. We sought the advice from teachers and they are very excited to use this product.

What we learned

What's next for HUZZAH Virtual Classoom

Once funded, we are planning to develop this as an Android and iOS App with a website portal for teachers. Students will have the ability to log into different classrooms for speciality lessons (Art, Music etc). We envision customizable classroom sizes and more avatar options as well as engaging animation and sound effects. This will include 2-way Black Board writing functionality, allowing students to write answers to questions on the blackboard. We want to develop the teacher website to include participation tracking/statistics for each student. Parents will also have an app login so they will have the ability to see their child’s progress and development. We are confident that the development plans and beta testing (in schools) are possible, as long as we get funding for coding.