eCurriculum for Kids
Dew Learning was created with the ambitious goal of developing a curriculum for students in kindergarten through 4th-grade while simultaneously building the platform to deliver it to the web and iPad. I was brought on as the sole front-end developer to work with two back-end developers.
Interactive Widgets
I was bothered that the lessons being written by educators were text-heavy and didn’t leverage the interactive nature of the medium. After a brainstorming session with the head writer and another developer, I came away with some feature ideas to make the lessons feel less like a boring textbook.
Instant Definitions
Using Merriam-Webster’s API, I arranged for any highlighted word to be defined at a 4th-grade level along with the option to hear it pronounced.
Image Labeling
Writer-educators used this feature to upload and then label an image. In the lesson the labels would be lined up on the left in random order with their corresponding dots scattered throughout the image. After dragging and dropping the labels on the dots, the student would get instant feedback on how well he or she had done. This was a flexible tool used by educators with maps, anatomical illustrations, an image of our solar system, and many other kinds of images.
Guided Tour
This tool allowed educators to upload a large, complex image which they could then zoom in on and write descriptions for particular areas of the image. The student would then see the image as a whole and then go step-by-step through the parts of the image with the educator’s description for each step. This was especially useful for complex art scenes and timelines.