schoolhouse.world

A 6-month contract in 2020/21 where I helped a team of volunteers and contractors build the first web app version of schoolhouse.world, a free tutoring platform.

motivation

Sal Khan (founder of Khan Academy) had the idea for a digital tutoring platform that was completely free. After volunteering there as a math tutor and part-time designer, they brought me on full-time for 6 months to help create a proper web app for their platform.

first steps

I kicked things off with a design sprint to help the team better understand what worked and what didn't in the existing prototype version they had built using Coda documents. Since the team mostly resided in the US, and I was in Sydney, there would be the additional challenge of coordinating many of the design sprint tasks asynchronously. I did my best.

start building

Taking what we'd learnt in the design sprint, I fleshed out a site map so we could start breaking down the build into smaller parts and get started. Since we were a bit low on dev resources, I also helped contribute front-end code to the landing page so they could focus on the main app.

visuals

While we were building out I decided to iterate a bit on our brand mark, as well as make illustrations for the landing page.

iteration

From here it was just a matter of constant iteration, and testing with students and tutors to figure out the best path forward. The largest chunk of my time during the contract was spent iterating, so feel free to reach out if you'd like to discuss this period more.