Improving Homeschool Learning Experience
Homemade Genius is a web app that aims to provide a better homeschooling experience. It helps homeschoolers easily find learning resources that best fit, plan and share their own courses with others in the community, and keep a detailed record of the learning processes.
Sketch, Figma, RawShorts,
Illustrator, Photoshop
Oct 2017 - Ongoing
In our interviews with homeschool parents and former homeschool kids, we asked questions regarding their motivations for choosing homeschool education, approaches for finding homeschool learning resources, communications between homeschool parents and their kids, and any frustrations and concerns throughout their homeschooling experience. Questions are phrased open-ended and non-judgmental, but for the purpose of getting concret response.
Meet some homeschool parents we've talked to and see what they say:
After completing each interview, our team went over key findings that were revealed during interviews as a group, using notes and recordings as points of discussion. Individual pieces of data, those that captured single facts about homeschooling education, were recorded as discrete affinity notes and then incorporated into an integrated affinity wall.
[Click for larger view]
After our interviews with homeschoolers and subsequent analysis, we brainstormed potential solutions together and proposed Homemade Genius, an integrated online homeschooling community for finding learning resources that best fit, planning and sharing courses, keeping detailed learning record, and connecting with people with similar interests, etc.
Bringing our ideas to some homeschoolers and information professionals, we received many positive feedback on the general concepts as well as constructive suggestions for what the system enables. Specifically,
With these feedback and suggestions, here's a glimpse of what you can do with Homemade Genius:
For a more interactive and complete prototype, please check out the video for a hi-fi demo.
This project was first initiated as a part of the 2018 ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, featuring the theme of engage. We really hope Homemade Genius can help homeschoolers best leverage the benefit of an active online community, eventually creating a home learning environment where information can be easily managed, tracked, and shared.
We are still actively testing our designs and getting feeback from target users and experts. Please reach out to us ([email protected]) if you are interested in learning more about the project or helping us with back-end implementation!