Planning, Scoping, and Definition

WHERE and WHO?
‍Due to the limitation of time, I started with the group of people that I have most connection with so that I could have better context. I decided to start with high school and college teachers.

‍HOW?
Apparently, human memories cannot break the Ebbinghaus’s forgetting curve, we need periodic repeating to stimulate our memory in order to store information long term. The existing tools such as attendance, name tags and in-class games are all based on some type of scheduled repetition to enhance our memory.

‍GOAL?
‍Our goal should not only be improving the efficiency of the existing approaches, we should also enhance the interactions between teachers and students.

Exploration, Synthesis, and Design Implications

All of these are still our assumptions, we need to validate them with our targeted group. I talked to 1 retired high school teacher, 2 college teachers and 1 college teaching assistant. With each one of them, I had 20 mins detailed discussion about their experience of remembering students’ names and faces including the methods they used and the difficulties they met.

Here's what I found:
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1) Most teachers have encounter names that are difficult(sometimes totally unable) for them to pronounce. How might we help human teachers to pronounce difficult names?

3) Most teachers tend to only remember a fraction of students better(usually more out-going, better performing), the other fraction tend to get less attention from the teacher or even sometimes neglected. How might we tune the scale?

4) Teachers don’t have extra time to memorize students’ name on purpose. How might we incorporate this task into teachers’ daily job without being intrusive?

Ideation

I sketched out three ideas:

Idea 1 - a system based on categorizing students. We all know humans can remember certain things better with more features. Knowing more about the students’ background, ethnic groups, and gender information might help the teacher with memorizing the name. However, we fear that racial and gender issues are too sensitive topics. This is very risky.

Idea 2 - a system based on Google’s super power in artificial intelligence(AI). Repeat the pictures of the group of students and try to help our human teacher to memorize everyone through repetition just like training a neural network. At every class, there would be a group picture of all the students taken by the camera installed in the classroom or by teacher using his/her phone. The teachers are required to take a quiz on whose faces correlate with whose names at the end of class. Indeed, teachers are allowed to make mistakes in the beginning, but they would definitely improve through repetition. It wouldn’t be long until they don’t make mistakes at all!

Idea 3 - a system that inject into the teacher’s daily activity and doesn’t appear to be too intrusive. Every teacher needs to grade their students’ assignments. Why don’t we help the teachers to remember their students better through the students’ homework? Reminding the teacher which face correlate to the homework they just graded seems like a much more natural way to help our teacher memorizing all the students’ faces. The student’s name and picture will pop up at the end of grading. In this way, teachers’ memory of students are enhanced periodically. Meanwhile, teachers would also know who’s doing well in class and who might need more help. If teachers have hard time remembering someone, they could also read more about the student’s on-line profile and gain more info.

Alright, let’s see how the teachers respond to our proposed solutions! Without much surprise, the first idea was given a big NO due to the potential bias caused by categorization. The second idea got good feedback on the potential effectiveness of improving teacher’s accuracy in face and name correlation, but it also got some red flags. For instance, whether teachers’ or the school’s surveillance camera randomly taking pictures of students is ethical or not is still up for debate. Meanwhile, even if there’s a group picture of the students after every class, teacher still has to spend extra hours doing a seemingly boring quiz just for memorizing dozens of names and faces. Is it worth it? No! The third idea got support from almost all the teachers I talked to. Teachers agreed that they would be less annoyed by the reminder after grading the assignment since they have to grade the assignments anyway. Someone suggested the reminder should be turned into a quiz to strengthen teacher’s involvement. If the teacher mistaken a face for the corresponding student, the system would repeat the mistaken face until the teacher perfectly memorized everyone’s face. This would be particularly useful in the beginning of a new semester where there are lots of new students and the system should gradually become hands-off once teacher’s un-aided memory becomes accurate.

Concept Generation and Early Prototype Iteration

Based on teachers’ feedback, I decided to move forward with the 3rd idea.

Google already has a homework submission and grading platform — Google Classroom. Instead of rebuilding a new product from scratch, it is more efficient to redesign the existing Google product and add our new features on top of it. More conveniently, Google already has everyone’s basic profile from Platforms such as Google +. We could let the students create an education profile based on the existing Google+ profile by adding further information like self-description and education history.

Evaluation, Refinement, and Production

The new experience is integrated into current Google Classroom experience, therefore, it only requires minimal additional effort from students and teachers. Students are encouraged to create their profiles by uploading self-description, pictures and videos. However, updating information is not mandatory. We could also get students’ basic information from the school’s database or from Google+ with students’ consent.

Before the teacher grades students’ work, their profile photos are hidden and replaced by avatars(eg. emojis). After grading, the student’s partial profile will pop-up. At this point, the teacher can check the name’s pronunciation and read what the student wrote about himself/herself. Along with the partial profile, there’s a quiz of selecting the correct corresponding photo. The complete profile will show up if the teacher gets the right answer. The experience repeats while the teacher grades the next homework. Eventually, when the teacher successfully recognize a student for more than twice, the system will stop showing this quiz any more.