Eager to learn more about Education Technology scene in the New York City after had been in the city for six months, I decided to join SW:NYC-EDU. In Startup Weekend, educators, business people, designers, and developers pitched their ideas to look for team members. Startup Weekend is a weekend long process from coming up with ideas to building the first version of the product. We came up with “Math Matchup,” a platform to gamify Math instruction in the classroom through mini Math game show in the classroom using web-based application.

Our team comprised of  Instructional Technology and Media students, middle school math teacher, UX designer, business consultant, and programmer.

The Problem that we aim to tackle:

Current products focus on having students work independently on a computer through a series of problems

• isolating
• focus on right vs. wrong answer rather than process and solutions
• Not every teachers have strong knowledge of math content

The bottom line is that we see is teachers need a platform to engage students of all skills levels in a collaborative and meaningful way. Students need an educational experience that is engaging and incentivizes collaboration.

Functions and steps to use the program

 As an instructional designer, I led a design thinking session with the team to come up with problem statement and brainstorm for applicable solutions. We also had to find a testimonial who is a middle school student to test our product and give us some feedback. At that time it was around 9 pm at night, and it was pretty much impossible to find a student at that time. So I got an idea of interviewing a student in the west coast since the time is three hour behind. I interviewed my close friend’s nephew who was studying at a public school in Los Altos. To better illustrate our idea, I made a short video presentation of how the software will work in the classroom.

We didn’t win the challenge but it was a productive weekend for us to start building our idea from scratch. We learned about the process of starting a company: identifying a problem, forming a team, coming up with solution, receiving feedback from experts and users, and rapid iteration.

Contributors:

Candice Johnson, Sawaros Thanapornsangsuth, Dasheng Zhang, Hoai Vuong, Rick Metzger and Sumet Singh