Improving Education with AI Tools

EXPERIENCE GAP(s) and OBJECTIVE

Teachers spend evenings and weekends creating and grading assignments, personalizing lessons, and tracking how the class is doing. There is never enough time, and they could use real help.

Interviews with elementary teachers showed that one lesson plan rarely fits a whole class, and building leveled content for each student simply didn't fit in the day.

Objective
Give elementary teachers back their time and a daily read on the class, so they can:

Create standards-based content tailored to each student's level and learning style
Keep a regular pulse on how every student is doing
See each child's journey across grades
Keep parents informed, with ways to help at home

Measuring Success
Long term, success would be measured by product adoption, and feedback on usefulness, ease of use, and satisfaction by all user types. Short term, the success would be measured by creating a working product to demo.

What discovery research surfaced

Problem 01: No time to personalize lessons for every student's level. A teacher holding a worksheet says each student needs something different, while one student looks confused, one is fine, and one is asleep.

Problem 02: No regular pulse check, so progress waits 9 weeks, not daily. A teacher asks how her students are doing today, with a nine-week grading calendar showing the report card is weeks away.

Problem 03: No holistic picture of a child's journey across grades. A teacher asks what happened last year, with folders for kindergarten, first, and third grade and the second grade folder missing.

Problem 04: Parents only see report cards and conferences. A parent asks whether his daughter is keeping up, but sees only a report card and a conference date, with the next update nine weeks away.

THE DESIGN SOLUTION

ClassPulse is an AI teaching assistant for the elementary classroom. It adapts lesson plans to every student, checks in with the class every day, follows each child across grades, and keeps parents informed. Each part of the design answers one of the four problems above.

One home for the whole class

The home screen gives a teacher a quick pulse before the day starts: how many students are on track in Math and Language Arts and how closely plans line up with the standards. A short "Check in with" list puts the students who need support first. Teachers can also import earlier graded work (scans, worksheets, gradebook exports, or Schoology) so Pulse can match each question to a standard and update student progress.

ClassPulse home screen. A greeting for Ms. Rivera's 3rd grade class, summary tiles for students, on-track percentages in Math and Language Arts and plan alignment, an Import Assignments area with drag and drop, and a Check in with list of students who need support. — The ClassPulse home screen. Sample data shown.

Solves problem 01 Lesson plans that adapt to every student

Plans are created from the curriculum and tagged with the standards they address, so teachers start from something aligned. Adapt with Pulse opens an assistant right inside the plan. One tap can simplify a lesson for students who need support, add a hands-on activity for physical learners, turn Friday into a review day, or reteach what students missed on pulse checks. The teacher stays in control of what changes.

A Week 10 math lesson plan with its standards and daily sequence, and an Adapt with Pulse panel open on the right offering suggestions such as simplify for students who need support, add a hands-on activity for physical learners, turn Friday into a review day, and reteach what students missed on pulse checks. — A standards-based lesson plan with the Adapt with Pulse assistant open.

Solves problem 02 A daily pulse instead of a nine-week wait

Each morning students answer three short recall questions. Pulse Results turns the answers into a view a teacher can read in seconds: how many students checked in, how many questions were answered correctly, who got all three right and who got none or one, and which questions the class missed. Filters for day, week, month, quarter, or a single student show what to reteach and who needs a quick check-in, today, not at the end of the grading period.

The Pulse Results screen with day, week, month, quarter, and custom timeframes, summary tiles for check-ins completed and questions answered correctly, a score breakdown bar chart, and a list of question results showing how many students got each question right. — Pulse Results: the class's daily check-ins at a glance. Sample data shown.

Solves problem 03 A student's whole journey in one profile

Each student profile brings together learning style, current standing in Math and Language Arts, and progress by grade from kindergarten forward, so no year goes missing. A callout names the trend, such as Math moving from Needs support in second grade to Approaching this year, and parents and guardians are listed on the same page.

A student profile with progress across grades. Sample data shown.

Solves problem 04 Parents in the loop, with ways to help at home

Pulse+ extends the design to families. Parents get a weekly "what we learned" digest with three questions to ask at dinner, five-minute at-home practice matched to the skills their child is still working on, and two-way messages with the teacher that are translated into the family's home language. Students get practice that matches their learning style and a small weekly goal of their own.

The Pulse+ screen with a For Parents section: a Get Pulse+ for your family banner and idea cards for a weekly digest, at-home practice, and messages in your language. Above it, student ideas such as Learn my way and My goals. — Pulse+ for students and parents.

OUTCOMES and IMPACT

This project was part of an Oracle sponsored Hackathon at Vanderbilt University, so the product has not yet launched.

The expected outcomes after use:

Teachers get time back and a daily read on the class
Every student can get standards-aligned content at their level, from catch-up to advanced.
Parents get regular progress updates with activities to support learning at home, instead of a report card every nine weeks.

After sharing the MVP product with the teachers that were originally interviewed, they were very pleased with it, and said things like "wow, I'd love to start using this tomorrow", and "Schools could provide kids with a much more tailored education by giving time back to the teachers".

APPROACH, EFFORT, and ARTIFACTS

We interviewed elementary teachers, to understand the current issues in classrooms (for them, students, and parents). We also asked if they are currently using AI to assist with teaching, and if not, why not.

Understanding the real world needs, helped us quickly solution to solve for those current gaps.

We were able to create AI-assisted tools that connected to actual Federal standards and state curriculum to demonstrate the usefulness of the tool.

The AI-assistant also created pulse quizzes tied back to those standards and curriculum, to give the tool a feeling of realness when shared back with the educators for feedback.

I served as UX Lead on the project team with a product manager and 2 developers. I led the research, created all design, and created the interactive prototype (within the span of 2 days).

Artifacts and Outputs

Storyboards illustrating the issues with the current processes
Designs of potential solutions to the discovered problems
Interactive prototype, for concept testing and development
Slide deck to present the process and MVP product to a panel of judges

LEARNINGS

I learned how quickly we can go from real world issues, to potential solutions. The typical corporate project cycle could be condensed with smaller teams, focused objectives, and the allowance for experimentation and user research.