Class Equity — classroom economy platform
What’s Class Equity?
It’s a platform launched in August 2021 by Katie and Abby — two entrepreneurs based out in the US who’s mission is to increase economic mobility by empowering students to become financially responsible.
This platform allows teachers to apply classroom economy digitally, incorporating financial literacy into everyday routine. By the time I started working on this project, it already had 10,000 active users.
What does Classroom Economy mean?
Consist of 5 main components:
- Classroom jobs (for students to be responsible for different activities/things and get paid)
- Bills (that teacher charges on a weekly/monthly basis)
- Bonuses (for behaving well, getting good grades, etc.)
- Fines (for misbehaving, being late, etc.)
- Classroom store
Stakeholder briefing
Want to make the app look like a real bank account but for kids.
She wanted to add more features like
- budgeting
- Landing money
- Peer-to-peer money transfer
- Buying gifts for classmates, etc.
Since they have already improved the teacher’s flow, Jil wanted me to focus on student’s side.
Interview with a teacher
Her Pain points:
- Expand the To-Do List — it doesn’t show all the necessary information like class and job description. Since each student can be part of more than 1 class, it’s hard to follow the to-do list, especially for 1–4 graders
- How to motivate students to save more rather than spend — the teacher lack tools on this app that she could use to teach her students why saving is essential in personal finance
- Goal setting feature — students have been already taught how to set personal goals, but since this feature is absent, they just do it on papers
- Budgeting Feature — is another essential part of financial education that was missing from this website
- Notification students were not receiving any notifications whenever a teacher would send them a job offer, about a successful purchase in the store, etc.
- For kids in 1–4 grades it was very hard to find the store and jobs — those two main features that students like using the most were hidden in a classroom.
- Add more interactions for students
In order to see what issue do students face while using the app, I invited some of them to my interviews with teacher so that I can observe student’s interaction with Class Equity.
Age of students 6–8 years old since mostly teachers use this app for 1–6 graders.
Student’s pain-points:
- Onboarding is too advanced — some students were not able to type their names, classroom code, password, etc. as there are too many fields and not all of them knew how to use the keyboard
- Dashboard doesn’t have all the necessary information and the hierarchy of information is lacking.
- Some kids were not able to find the Store and even buy something.
- They liked setting up the profile , but it was very short and limited
- Besides buying and applying for jobs there was no more activities for students , unless a teacher sends or requests money
- Students loved the sound effects of receiving money , it made me think what else can we add to make them more motivated and bring them more satisfaction
User Persona
Problem & Hypothesis statement
I believe that by improving the overall structure and flow of the website, as well as ending a two new features (budgeting and goal setting), will help kids to easily navigate and therefore learn faster.
- Add a new feature — budgeting
- Make Job and Shop more visible in a classroom and well-structured
- Improve the dashboard
Mood board and style tile
Most kids tend to have favourite colours that they would want to have all their things in. Some would even refuse using some colours, like boys don’t like pink and red, some girls don’t like blue and black, etc.
Making the page colourful would not only solve this issue, but also will make the page look more fun and playful. However, in order to not to make the page very vibrant to the point that it feels overwhelming, I decided to narrow down the number of colours to 5 accent colours and light background. It would give the page a light and lively, but at the same organised look (since it still should be a personal bank for kids).
