Making math digital

All other subjects in the classroom were accessible except for Math

Math really sucks. (Actually I love it).  But for kids, it's the lowest part of the day.  Why?  Only in Math class (especially in USA), do I still have to use a pen & pencil instead of a laptop.

This makes math less accessible to many students and teachers alike.  We decided to change that.

An animation I created for a sneak peek launch In 2018 at ISTE

Concept is simple right?  No.

Look at your keyboard.  Tell me how you would type a multi-levelled quadratic equation with that?

You could but probably with great difficulty.

Writing Math on a keyboard is darn near impossible

I conducted a design sprint.  I proposed personas based on interviews with some of our supportive early adopters that we had told the idea too.

I asked a series of questions that would help form our target personas:

Original sketches of Equatio

This was a much lighter approach to design than what we'd done before.  We wanted to get an MVP out for ISTE that year.  Anyway, from those interviews we created a value prop and a narrative.  We also came up with "How might we's?" from their pain points:

I came up with the idea of "math prediction" as a way of making keyboard input easier

I began to ideate and share my ideas with our super teachers and students.  I got feedback.

This included that:

With these in mind, we created and answered more how might we's:

The students who opened my eyes in Cincinnati 

I created a hi-fidelity prototype to test with students.  I felt that they would appreciate a "real" looking app.

I then tested this with students in Cincinnati.  I travelled there to observe a normal math class in the US to see for myself.  Then I showed them the prototype, asked questions and recorded the qualitative feedback.

One of the assumptions I made at the start was that this wouldn't just be a student based app.  Teachers would use this too.  They would use it to teach, assess and explain.  So because of that, I needed to think of the physical environment a teacher works in.

In Cincy, I got a real feel for the environment that day.  I designed the app for the bottom of the screen.  This was for a few reasons.  I felt that math would be predominantly horizontal.  This was validated in a Cincy K-12 class.  I also felt that teachers would use interactive boards and that the toolbar should be at the bottom to make it physically accessible for ALL teachers and students.  This was also validated in Cincy.  It was a very successful trip with constructive feedback which included having a dark-mode as the white can be very start and not great for people with Dyslexia.  Something I should have thought of tbh.

We used the feedback, firmed up designs and did a feasibility check so that we could build an effective but minimal prototype for ISTE.

This is definitely a project I am extremely proud of and Equatio continues to have millions of users today.