Project Overview
Re-Engage was a project I worked on as part of my Creative Technology bachelor’s studies. In a team of five, we aimed to design a tool to help teachers track and improve student engagement during lectures. After conducting user research, we identified that lecture pacing—whether too fast or too slow—was a significant factor in student disengagement.
The solution we developed involved a real-time engagement tracking system: each student had a small cube on their desk with symbols on its faces to indicate their feedback (e.g., “too fast,” “too slow,” or “just right”). A camera system equipped with computer vision would tally the votes and provide teachers with a real-time graphical overview of the class’s engagement, enabling them to adjust their pacing accordingly.
My Contributions
- Interaction Design: Designed the physical cubes, focusing on intuitive and non-intrusive interaction for students.
- User Research and Requirement Gathering: Conducted interviews with teachers to understand their needs, preferences, and pain points around engagement feedback. This user-centered approach ensured the tool directly addressed classroom challenges.
- Interface Design: Created the teacher-facing dashboard, emphasizing clarity and simplicity to make it easy to interpret engagement data in real time.
Impact
- Award Recognition: Re-Engage won the “Best Project” award among three other studies, recognizing its innovative use of AI in education and strong focus on privacy and user-centered design.
- Scalable Solution: Teachers appreciated the system’s potential as an affordable and scalable tool for educational institutions, demonstrating how AI can improve classroom dynamics without being intrusive.
- This project helped me grow my skills in user-centered design, prototyping, and teamwork while working on a real-world challenge. As a student, I felt personally connected to the issue of disengagement and was motivated to create a meaningful solution. Talking with teachers gave me a new perspective on their challenges and inspired me to find ways to bridge the gap between educators and students.
