EIDU Teacher

Often teachers in schools in informal settlements in low-income lack resources to use materials in class, and also the proper training to develop effective lesson plans. In a three-month experiment, we at EIDU wanted to understand what the potential of a teacher app for our customers was beside the already existing self-learning app. While the idea was shelved in the end to focus on drastically improving our self-learning app, we learned a lot through the experiment.

The teacher’s app is good because it shows how much you love and care for teachers.

Choosing from the curriculum

To choose an appropriate lesson, teachers would select a subject, and within the subject further subdivisions that the teachers are familiar with the Kenyan curriculum (strand and a sub-strand). In the following picture, the user chose subject Mathematics, strand Classification, and sub-strand Sorting & Grouping. A number of lessons are then displayed for this specific sub-strand in a list equal to the number of classes that should be taught for this sub-strand.

Lesson & Material tabs

After choosing a lesson, the teacher can tab between two screens: one showing the lesson instructions and the other the materials that the teacher will need to use when teaching the lesson. The scrolling state preserves when switching between the tabs. While this might be a bit of an unconventional solution - in most apps one instruction and materials are mixed -, it was the one that was the most intuitive to the teachers. Teachers would read the instructions before the lesson and browse through the materials during the lesson.

Materials

Some materials were videos, some were images. Where appropriate teachers would go through slideshows that allowed for the closer relationship of content, e.g., teaching children multiple colors in a row.

Lessons given, lessons learned

In our test group, we noticed good usage of the app. The onboarding was quick and easy for the teachers.

Especially the videos our teachers were interested in. Given the high relative cost for data that our teachers face, our videos are a great tool to provide interactive content at no cost. Additionally, it is the most engaging and captivating content for young learners.

Teachers related best to content that was close to what they already did and were much less likely to try out novel teaching ideas.