June 2020 — End of Month Update
Hi everyone 🍉
Summer is setting in, the heat is rising and the rainy season has started in Japan.
I’m really looking forward to it, I think the rainy season and the summer heat might be one of my favorite seasons here haha. It has such a 懐かしい feeling to it for me.
Continuing the theme from last month, NativShark has had an even better month. The momentum has carried through and I’m anticipating a great July as well.
Let’s get into some specifics about the improvements from the different parts of NativShark…
Progress report
A look at what’s been going on during the month of June in Management, Content and Development at NativShark.
Management
As per last month’s update, we’ve been working on bringing standardized project management methods into our flows at NativShark as part of our continued growth as a company.
Somewhere between 6 and 10 team members and this kind of thing becomes incredibly necessary, especially when the product being built is as incredibly massive as NativShark.
It takes a lot of work to refine such a product down to the set of core launchable functionalities, though in the first week of June we’ve done just that and began properly implementing an Agile project management system loosely following the SCRUM principles.
We started with bringing Agile methods to the engineering team, then the management team, then content team, and now we’re working out how to implement agile in the media and art teams.
Building a system of project management that works inside a company is different and unique for every company; there are no copy-paste solutions. Though, naturally, we’re still growing and improving our efforts weekly (as one should in an agile organization) and we’ve made a lot of progress in systematizing NativShark.
With agile comes learning to separate what to do when and learning to prioritize. We’ve been figuring out the question, “what does ‘Agile at NativShark’ look and function like?”
Exciting times.
With that, we now have a much clearer view of what it will actually take to release the core experience. We’re looking at July or August as being launch ready.
Lastly, something major Niko and I have done this past month is build out a mindmap of the entire organization of NativShark in order to get it out of our heads and out into the world for team members to see. Here’s a screenshot of what that looks like zoomed out enough to almost show the whole structure:
With that, we refined our mission, vision, and guiding principles, and I’d like to share them with you.
The NativShark Vision
A more understanding, connected and multilingual future.
The NativShark Mission
Make learning simple.
NativShark’s Guiding Principle
The power of education is for everyone.
Content
The content team has been editing all the Phase One content during June, getting it primed and ready.
Additionally, we’ve been working on creative ways to teach concepts in lessons with the tools available to us as part of the core experience launch. In the future we’ll be able to add even more neat elements to teach different concepts even better.
We’ve been doing things such as standardizing the use of elements and highlights. So no matter the lesson, you can bring up the highlight legend and get a refresh on what they represent in regards to helping you create a framework in your mind for understanding Japanese.
Here’s an example:
Now I want to take a quick look at, “what actually is the ‘core experience’?”
The core experience of NativShark is being able to set your study goal completion pace with the pace slider, log in everyday, hit the “Study Now” button and have all of the core studies needed delivered to you in an i+1 fashion.
In an oversimplified way, to do this, we’ve built out the system to have a Path that has Phases in it, Phases that have Units in them and Units that have Studyables in them.
A Path is the language you’re learning, so in this initial case, English to Japanese.
A Phase is a group of Units arranged linearly that build your language ability up to a certain level.
A Unit is a group of Studyables. On the standard pace, you’ll complete one Unit per day.
Studyables are lessons, flashcards, dialogues, or assigned activities (such as learning kana, conjugation quizzes, comprehension quizzes, production quizzes etc).
What we’re launching with is the full core experience, with content through Phase One. At the standard pace, Phase One takes around 5 months to complete.
For those familiar with NihongoShark, NativShark Phase One is nearly 100% different. The kanji are taught differently, the vocabulary are new and taught in a different order, and the lessons are new or significantly reworked. In some sense, NativShark Phase One is what NihongoShark Phase One and Two used to be.
One of the more significant impactful differences between NHS and NativShark is the addition of Dialogues, which are what actually drive the content creation of a Phase.
Development
One of the main things, besides the health challenges we faced in February and March and the lack of scalable project management systems that has continually blocked us from releasing student content, has been the content management platform.
In order for NativShark to be NativShark, there had to be a robust content admin site built to power the lessons and the platform. While we of course couldn’t get all the features of the system in, we’ve finally finished it to the point that content can be made and delivered.
Now we’re on to finishing up the student experience side of things.
That said, I’d like to show you a look at some of the stuff we’ve built in the past month.
We’ve just finished the Dialogue Editor:
In the lesson editor, we’ve built interactive sentence elements that play audio, show formality level of the sentence, and hover-able literal breakdowns that highlight the corresponding Japanese:
And we have kanji cards with animated stroke order:
This stuff is really exciting to use and see finally coming together.
Bringing agile methods into the engineering team has worked miracles for focus and productivity by providing transparency and bringing the team together to work as one unit. Our teams are now Fullstack dynamic teams, rather than building each part of the stack separately.
Community
We’ve broken the #日本語で channel into two channels, #formal-日本語で and #casual-日本語で. This is so that community members and students can get practice and corrections in both types of speech, as native speakers often stop by these channels and provide corrections for students in #日本語で-chat-corrections. Additionally, Phase One teaches a lot of casual Japanese and we wanted to provide students with a place to practice the language they’re learning.
In summary / tl;dr
What’s done:
- Redesigned and built logged out pages ✅
Landing page, pricing page, community page, process page, faq page. - Finished Content Management Platform to lesson-publishable state ✅
Lesson editor, dialogue editor, vocabulary entry editor, sentence editor, kanji entry editor, path planner, phase planner, unit planner (including system flashcard builder), audio for every sentence recorded and addable, browse page for content writers to search all in progress and published content. - Finished server / backend code of main student experience systems ✅
System flashcards, dialogues, study now experience, progression system / pace slider, student account settings, using NativShark articles, lessons renderable. - All 166 Phase One lessons added to the platform ✅
What’s left:
- Final checks on content ⌛️
Ordering the units in the phase and proofreading everything.
All 755 Phase One kanji added to the platform, all 1066 Phase One vocabulary cards added to the platform, 165 Phase One dialogues entered into the platform - Finalizing the student-facing experience ⌛️
Front end of system flashcards, front end of the Study Now experience, attach frontend of progression system and pace slider to the working backend code, updated student dashboard, improvements to the payments system, stability improvements, content update to shadow loops. - Final checks and community testing ⌛️
Bug fixes and stability changes in response to initial feedback. - Launch 🚀
Thanks for reading, and thanks for being part of our community. With all that is going on in the world, I hope you’re doing well. We’re really looking forward to being able to bring the joy of learning to you all very soon.
Best,
Caleb
