Presumptions such as “Kids don’t want to study “are highly
misleading. They push us towards a conclusion that dulls our innovation and
takes companies towards hard selling instead of working towards a product pull.
We questioned these conclusions related to the way kids study and tried to find
out why we reached here in the first place and what can be done better.
Predetermining and fixating on consumer behavior is a big mistake, especially
in industries wedded with technology. Education is fast becoming one of them
and it begged further introspection. And that’s what we did.
We took a very close look at student behavior and suddenly
found what we were doing wrong.
We were trying to make the student bend to our behavior.
We were playing headmaster and telling them what to do. Big mistake! It is
important to adapt to children rather than the other way round. Kids run on instinct.
It is interesting to look into what children enjoy doing the most and
incorporate some of these features in their education methodologies. According
to Clayton M. Christensen in ‘Disrupting Class’, children like to do two
things.
- Have fun with friends and
- Feel successful.
We verified and arrived at the same
conclusions after innumerable student interactions and pouring over almost a
million points of student data. We learned
that we had to engage them on their home ground. Asking them to move was always
wrong to begin with. Online tools help in engaging students more efficiently
but this alone is not sufficient as these tools tend to be boring, mind numbing
and definitely do not make students feel successful.Compelling evidence led us towards cognitive science and
Gamification.
Gamification is the use of game mechanics in a non-game
environment. Health, education, HR etc. have
lent themselves to such experimentation and emerged victorious-but we had to
see it for ourselves. In the online
world, Gamification is directly related to the customer engagement. Users are
exposed to very short feedback cycles that sometimes translate to urgency,
points, levels, epic meaning and game like competitiveness that keeps them
entertained and engaged. For kids, the process of having predefined goals and
continuous feedback on their progress (and not in some obscure report telling
them their weaknesses) was a way to implement this approach.
We hypothesized
that this would allow a mind to focus much better on accomplishing smaller
short-term objectives while moving towards the larger goal. For children, it
meant engaging them without making them feel like they were studying. Breaking
the whole system down to a few manageable parts at a time for them was what we
wanted to play around with. So when Horlicks came to us looking for something
different to help their customers succeed at their exams, it was perfect timing. Got to thank our ad-sales guy for that.
We wanted to verify the effectiveness of Gamification but yet wanted to go lean. Hence, we created Android mobile phone apps. We obsessed over everything. We had to. Conclusions from this experiment could have large implications. Our in-house designers had to learn to design mobile apps, our content team had
to suddenly work with byte sized micro portions of the syllabus and our
developers had to learn how to code for the real time and in the cloud. It took a lot of coffee
to get here. In the process we built a team that was great at wow-ing responsive design,
node.js, amazon web services and mLearning. We discovered the world of multiple devices and how to design for them.
With the apps we built, a
CBSE/ICSE/State Board student in class 6th, 7th, 8th, 9th or 10th can practice
all chapters of selected subjects sitting in the comfort of his or her home or
on the go. The easy to use and intuitive interface of the Horlicks Prepora (Pandora of exam prep !) app helps to
accurately practice a chapter and then review ones performance. The Horlicks Chapter Notes - Revise Anytime.
Anywhere! App aims towards simplifying the revision process. A student can
revise important concepts, explanations and formulae in just two steps.
After what seems like a million iterations, the apps finally looks like this.
Prepora
Chapter Notes
After a 2 months of late nights, caffeine and pizzas, what did we find? That
- Children were spending more time on a small mobile screen than a web app
- The Leaderboard was a hit. Kids loved to look at it and make sure they were winning
- A remarkable 85% percent of users who started a test, finished it! A big win for intrinsic motivation.
- Kids love to create and hate things that don't do everything
- Lean innovation rules and constant experimentation is the only way to know what can work!
Encouraged by what we
have achieved we shall keep moving, trying, failing, succeeding and
pivoting. Maybe remote tutoring is next? Who knows.
Did Gamification work?
We don't know, but it's looking good so far.
For now, students can look forward to the next version which would be more narrowcasted, more local, more social, more beautiful and more effective. We even made a cool website to help everyone locate us better. Let us know if you have more ideas. Anything could work!
