Zanza — Made from marzipan
Hello 2015 — we wish a happy new year for all of you. Well, we shouldn’t hurry that much ahead… Before getting to 2015, let’s see how we were getting things done last year. It always feels good to look back to the previous year, because usually we don’t see how many things are going on at the same time throughout a year.
If we think of 2014, Zanza.tv is one project that comes to the mind of all of us. It is an educational site for secondary school students. The project owner was Eduweb and we took part in developing the site. And we were happy to do so because it was a great feeling to recall all those memories from our high school years. „We’re gonna have a test next week so we’ve got plenty of time to get prepared. But one day before the test… Facepalm… Aaaah, the test is tomorrow and I don’t know anything.” This feeling must be quite familiar for many people. And also for us. Plato, parts of speech, complex sentences, combinatorics. Eh, good old times. This educational site has come into being with the aim to help students use online platforms for their learning. It is a great tool they can use online and in videos, on the bus or on the metro, as well as in the classroom as a visual aid. We have added our skills and competencies, so that students can easily search for information on our website.
What kind of experiences did we gain while developing the site?
Initially, it was defined as an e-learning project. Still, it was nice to see that Józsa Gabi and the team (Eduweb Zrt.) were not thinking in terms of a standard framework but wanted to come up with a really attractive interface. Although it was an e-learning project in practice, the solution was not Moodle but a social platform like Drupal. During the whole project the most stress was put on usability and educational methodologies.
I was really fond of this topic and found it interesting also from a professional point of view. Of course, we often bumped into problems but we could always find a solution. The workload distribution was also fine so everybody could work at his own pace. The exercises were also of appropriate difficulty, thus, Zanza has given a sense of success to everyone. At the end of the year, there was an official opening ceremony where we could meet the teachers who had given the content for the site. They said they were really happy to hand over such a tool for the kids. It was a very good feedback for me, too.
One of the greatest experiences for me was that we could work with real content already from the beginning of the development process. This way we could get acquainted with the exercises while working on the project. The site has a three-fold structure: it consists of a video, a test and downloadable sheet with certain activities. The results can be checked with the help of a tracking function. During the testing process, we also had to solve certain tasks, so I got to be a pro in historical quiz questions about the Kádár era, as well. Throughout the project it came very often to my mind how useful Zanza could have been in my high school years. The internet was not as prevalent at that time as it is now: it was more difficult to find useful content and virtually there was no access to Hungarian videos. It is fantastic that today’s youngsters can learn like this now.
So the Zanza project was one of our favs in 2014. And the icing on the cake is that in the Hungarian Website of the Year Contest Zanza.tv tucked in a Special Prize in the Educational category and got to be the Website of the Year in the E-learning category. It was a great pleasure to be a part of this huge success. We do hope that lots of students, teachers and parents will happy to use the site of Zanza.tv. Anyway, we wish them a good time and lots of success for their studies.
