Background
For centuries, history played an important role connecting past and future. History education establish its influence basically through politics, economy, culture, etc. This is to say, absorbing history knowledge can have a long-lasting impact on individuals with judgement of modern society and respect for history, especially on students.
Not only in the United States, history in many countries is also a compulsory course. However, historical knowledge is too large and complicate. It is hard for students to understand the points or have a systematic memory. Especially in modern times, there have been many movements and events.
In a study research, students show different views when learning history.
This is a very small part of my friend's notes when she was studying history in high school. You can see that it contains many information that need to be remember.
Searching for historical data is very cumbersome
Problem
When learning histoy, students have difficulty remembering large amounts of history and dont' know explanations of some proper nouns, which makes them not have an in-depth understanding of history and easy to fail in the test.
Pain point analysis
01. Currently, compared with learning apps for other subjects, apps about history are very rare.
03. Students need to sort out the knowledge points by themselves, which is very complicated to check.
02. Even if there is a historical app, the interface is very messy and the user experience is very bad.
Solution
As an important subject, an auxiliary app is needed to help students digest the knowledge they have learned. It will give different quiz to answer, a clear timeline to check information and a forum to discuss.
Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it.
- George Santayana
Students interview
I interviewed 3 students who need to study history.
Siran
High school student
She needs to recite the contents of many different periods of history, which leads to her often mistaken the time when it comes to exams.
Guessy
College student of design
She thinks checking information is the most painful. Although the elective history course is very interesting, a lot of time is wasted every time when she writes an essay to confirm whether the collected information is relevant.
DAVID
Postgraduate in Psychology
In his curriculum, it contains a history of psychology education. He is particularly troubled with the complicated memory of technical terms.
5 Key Features to struggle with
When I design this app, it has five points must to be solved.
Many times, students are told that they need to know a lot about history. Hence, most students juggle between trying to master many historical subjects in particular historical periods at the same time. It is a callenge that students get a general instead of an in-depth understanding of history.
Objectivity
Memory
Sources
Explanation
Linkage
How it work?
Brainstorming
Sketch
First design
Changes
An opportunity to learn better!
Task 1：Take Quiz
It is to consolidate the learned historical knowledge. Students can set different categories to answer quiz. The faster they answer, the higher the score is. It will record the score every time and give analysis. They can also check wrong answers and review them.
View course progress
Students can select different courses they want to learn.If the progress has been completed, they can reset it. This is linked to the timeline, so they can check from the answer immediately.
Quiz time
Students have 10 seconds to answer each question. The faster they answer, the higher their score. Only when they finish the quiz, can they check the answer.
Task 2：Check Timeline
It is to show a clear history timeline. Students can adjust different period or choose different classification like place, event, policy and so on. Some unintelligible proper nouns will be marked out so that users can check their explanation. Resources like picture, relatedbooks and other information are also included.
What happened on today
Give students a brief introduction about what happened on today in history.
Timeline adjust
Students can use scroll to select different period. The key events will be displayed, and some smaller events will pop up after clicking the circle.
Check detail
It provides the information that students need. If the reading content is too boring, they can choose to listen to the audio. It also outlines the terms that need to be explained, and students can click to view.
Task 3: Map Search
In addition to the age, students can choose the geographic location to find the historical data they want. The map will change according to different time periods.
Search place
It provides the information that students need. If the reading content is too boring, they can choose to listen to the audio. It also outlines the terms that need to be explained, and students can click to view.
Different events
They can learn about events that happened at the same time or the same place.
Task 4: Relation Search
They can use this function to sort out the relationship diagram of each event. Or they can check whether some unrelated events/people are related to the same people/events.
Task 5: Forum
If students have some special questions that have not been answered, they can go to the forum to find answers, or answer other people’s questions.
Some ideas for future