USE MARSHFELLOWS APP FOR A GREAT SUMMER CAMP EXPERIENCE
… AND LEARN A LANGUAGE WHILE USING IT
Task 3 -:-:- Week 3 -:-:- Ironhack Bootcamp Berlin -:-:-
Team of 2 (Germany and Germany)
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TASK
Smart People Inc., a company offering traditional English and Spanish language courses, as well as special summer camps would like to offer an equally engaging online experience to kids who cannot attend a real camp. 12 to 18 year-olds should be able to study a language while at the same time enjoying a wide range of activities, combining learning and fun.
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EMPATHIZE AND DEFINE
Summers can be long. Summers can be unbearably long if you have to stay home for whatever reasons. While your classmates go on vacation or join a real summer camp you are at home. You might feel desperate, you might feel bored, or even worse — boring. “If only I could go there, too”, you might think as a teenager. “If only I could get to know new people, dive into adventures and maybe learn a language while doing so. I’m not motivated to do so all by myself.”
With these pain points and goals of our users in mind, we started to look at the competitors. The most important ones proved to be summer camps and language apps. But if we positioned our Marshfellows app in an ideal way it would have a great advantage: It would be cheaper than a real summer camp and more fun than a mere language app. Above all, we asked ourselves:
HOW MIGHT WE MOTIVATE STUDENTS STAYING AT HOME DURING VACATION TO LEARN A LANGUAGE AND CONNECT WITH PEERS FOR SUMMER ACTIVITIES?
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IDEATE
We brainstormed the app’s features. We worked with the Moscow method to decide on the must-have features of the app, as well as the should- and could-haves. We were nearing a solution, always bearing in mind to convey the community-based character of a real summer camp.
In a site map, we listed the features we would like to see in our app thereby making sure all information was there and ready to go. We ran some card sorting and thanks to our users’ feedback decided to replace the coach label by a chat label and to integrate the coach chat into the user’s profile page instead.
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OUR SOLUTION
Search no longer. You can! Yes, you can. Marshfellows is here for this exact same reason: For you to can. “Marshfellows,” you might object, “am I supposed to hang out with marsh fellows, do you seriously want me to spend my summer with toads and frogs?”
Rethink Marshfellow. No toads, no frogs. Instead, fellows with whom you might grill some digital or real marshmellows.
These are the main features we have created for you and your summer learning adventure:
- Your own PROFILE with yourself as an avatar, a bulletin board, a direct link to your coach and a location map to see if there are other marshfellows near you or across the world. You might even want to meet some of the nearby marshfellows in real life.
- Your CHATS with the marshfellows of your tent, with the ones of your courses and all marshfellows using the app.
- Your TENT which you’ll be sharing with 20 English and 20 Spanish speaking marshfellows all summer with joint activities and a joint bulletin board.
- Your JOURNEY, an overview of your courses and your activities.
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PROTOTYPING AND TESTING
Before we came up with the mid-fidelity prototype, we drafted a low-fi version and had our users complete certain tasks such as configuring their avatars, uploading a picture to their bulletin board and finding their tent’s activities. The testings ran quite smoothly because we had already been discussing the features comprehensively when doing the card sorting at an earlier stage.
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OUTLOOK
If we were to come up with a high-fi prototype we would choose the visuals below to emphasize the feeling of summer (camp):
- Summer Camp Iconography and Wording (MARSHFELLOW/TENT/JOURNEY)
- Summer Colors (WOODS–GREEN/RIVER–BLUE/BLOSSOMS AND CHEEKS–PINKISH)
- Appropriate for kids and teens (FUN AND FOOLISH)
Are you ready for your learning adventure? Why not build a treehouse or a blueprint of a treehouse using instructions in the language you’d like to learn? Or how about taking pictures of blue objects only for you to share on the tent bulletin while your tent marshfellows will be looking for other colors in objects only? You’d rather go outside? Why not take the neighbor’s dog for a walk and track the streets you’ve been using?
Are all these ideas not the ones you’re looking for? Browse the many offers of Marshfellows. We are confident you will find just the perfect activities for your summer to turn out great and memorable. Should you still be unsure: Talk to your coach or one of your marshfellows. The community is there to help and inspire you!
