Dokumentation

For reasons of privacy protection we can't yet show the teaser video here.

UX-Design Award Q&A

„emma“ was submitted to the UX-Design Award for 2024. As the award is focused on Bachelor & Master-Thesis „emma“ wasn't nominated for technical reasons.

Project Pitch

With education, team work and an individualised learning-process at its core Emma is set to takle the increasingly detrimental shortage of teachers. Equipped with a personalised AI Emma stands to accompany children on their own educational journey.

Users, Challenge, Context

Representative of a global teacher shortage, Germany faces alarming numbers with estimates ranging from 20.000-35.000 vacant teaching positions in schools until 2035. Combined with more and more teachers failing to deliver classes due to increased stress and burnouts, a growing amount of lateral entrants with insufficient pedagogical training, the adherence to outdated teaching methods like frontal teaching with extremely low knowledge-retention (5-15%) and hopelessly outdated curricular content Children's education is suffering and will not be able to equip young people with the skills required to face the big challenges of the 21st century. The main users of Emma are children aged from 5-20 with teachers posing as secondary stakeholders.

Purpose and Solution Approach

With Cooperation being the key super-skill of the future group-work is at the core of this project-based approach to education. To stimulate students' intrinsic motivation each person is assigned an expert role tailored to their individual strengths and interests. To gain the required know-how, Emma conducts individual phases of learning & practice which enable students to acquire knowledge & skills in their individual learning style and at their own speed. This way children grow accustomed to cooperation early on and can be supported to the best of their abilities. With time freed up the teachers' focus shifts towards meaningful care work and managing said group-work. These fundamental virtues are also reflected in the interfaces' hardware.

User-Centric Research and Design

With this project being in regards to 1 of 3 orientation modules during the 3rd semester the research phase was fairly brief. Most insights were gained from personal experience and profound talks with teachers, parents and students about their school days. The latest PISA-study which was neatly released during the semester and expressed prior assumptions in numbers. More key wholistic insights were obtained from a detailed interview with OECD Director of Education Andreas Schleicher at ZDF on how Germany could reform and modernise its scholar-system. With these insights Emma is aimed to deliver a highly individualised learning-process with an ever-present sense of community and focus on cooperation through new teaching concepts and hardware.

USP, Innovation, User Benefits

The Emma interface consists of a base housing a computational unit which is connected to the AI-server, a transparent screen for a sense of community, a camera for gesture-control and table interactions a mini projector and speakers for auditory interaction. Even when combined with current LLMs like GPT4o this would be able to deliver a highly adaptable learning environment with immediate audio-visual feedback through the projector and natural language for increased engagement and knowledge-retention. By keeping this within the established infrastructure students are offered a safe space with trained personnel and an optimised learning environment with lots of social exchange for personal development.

Outcome and Business Value

For now Emma is targeting the German scholar system. However with the high adaptability of AI there is little in the way of scaling this product internationally and tailoring it towards diverse cultural needs and languages. As for the beginning, trial-periods would have to be conducted within privat schools that are less dependent on government regulations and have the finical means to fund such a low volume project. However the vision definitely strays towards improving mass-education as that's where the quality of education is most affected. The most important measurable outcome would be the educational, professional and interpersonal success of student.

Social and Planetary Values

With global democracies on a down-trend and misinformation dividing countries and political landscapes a profound education becomes more important than ever before if we want to conquer the wicked-problems of the 21st century. With education enabling more people to enter the national and global discourse this project could have wide-ranging effects on political participation and diversification, scientific progress towards preserving our livelihood and general happiness of individuals reaching their personal goals – all of which would increase the general standard of living even for those not being in a position of privilege yet. Free thinking, being able to grasp our surroundings and working together are essential skills for the future.

Additional Information

All these initial approaches are far from polished as this was more of a proof of concept during a relatively small project in the 3rd semester and there are lots of points to go from. But I believe it makes a strong case for the opportunity technology presents us with to actually improve our togetherness – possibly even on a global scale.

Next steps would predominantly include a vastly improved 2nd gen prototype with actual interactions, working on concepts for gamified teaching methods and deeper research on education, learning & pedagogy.

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