Carousel Learning

Carousel has been the biggest projects I’ve worked on while working with Aircury. This project was originally a spreadsheet pilot called the Retrieval Roulette developed by Adam Boxer.

After that, with a grant from Innovate UK, they’ve been able to take things to the next level, and build a program that will make a huge difference to student learning with minimal hassle for hardworking teachers.

Unfortunately, I cannot show the source code of that project. You can ask me for a demo or find yourself everything you need on Carousel’s Youtube Channel

I started designing the interface based on some UX suggestions that were given me by the Ed-Tech expert Joshua Perry and an initial idea of how they had in mind the interface could look like.

The project was divided in 3 main sectors that had to be independently designed:

1. The Landing Page, to showcase the product to teachers and institutions.
2. The Teachers’ Dashboard, to manage quizzes, question banks and classes.
3. The Students’ Quiz Area, to practice (based on the spaced repetition principle - reflected in the UI as flipping cards) or to take quizzes.

After an initial draft of the Landing Page, we already started identifying the core visual identity for the whole application. The style of the buttons, the fonts choice, the colors and the shadows, were all contributing to the final version of the design system.

Landing Page

You can take a look here for the landing page and here for the upgrade page.

This has been the starting point for defining Carousel’s branding. Light colors, big & rounded buttons were all contributing to the identity. We wanted to represent a very friendly way for integrating the spaced-repetition principles in UK classrooms.

Teacher Dashboard

The dashboard was one feature for creating and managing Classes, Quizzes and Question Banks. That’s basically the reference point for every teacher. All the content is organized within modern-looking, sortable tables. From there you can easily add new data with the click of a button - or access the contextual menu for more options.

There is also a marketplace for global Question Banks, so with just one click you can integrate a lot of questions (sometimes even thousands!) to use in your custom quizzes.

Work in progress!

Students Quiz Area

That’s where most of the fun stuff happens! After Teachers are done generating quizzes, it’s time to share the links with their students. All student can access with their first and last name.

They usually can find a Revise mode, which simulates flipping cards. You’ll be presented with a question on one side… you have to figure out the answer! If you still have any doubts, you can flip the card and find the exact answer that could potentially be in the test. But it’s not just for getting a good grade. It’s scientifically proven that this method works to make learning fun and stick to your long-term memory!

After students have done revising the content, it’s time to take the test. There may be multiple attempts - or just one. The teachers have the flexibility to set their own.

When providing an answer, students type what they know about the question. If it’s left blank, Carousel automarks the question as Incorrect. Same thing if the content is too different than the expected one.

In case the system “fails” to set the result correctly, students will be asked if they answered correctly or not. Of course, this can be validated by the teacher when every students has submitted the test and it’s going to be marked as locked.

There are a lot of things that Carousel can do to make learning easier and fun. We have received amazing feedback, including about how easy to use Carousel is.

People keep sending positive reviews to the team, and they all seem very pleased. Consider taking a look at Carousel’s Twitter Account to find out more about this project.

Work in progress!