Several million rural first-generation learners are now a part of India’s massive education system. They get negligible help at home and often have less-than-motivated teachers at school. Moreover, the curriculum is largely designed by urban natives to enable people to live in an urban society. This disconnects the rural student’s classroom learning from their real-life experiences and raises questions about the relevance and utility of learning.

In this project, I work on developing a learning tool to supplement school education by enabling self-learning. The tool is an aggregator of concept-wise interactives that take an application-first approach. Each interactive would incorporate local context to improve relevance and add interactivity for increased engagement with content, which provides conceptual clarity.

Using the context derived from primary field studies, I developed a sample application for teaching ‘lenses in the human eye'. It uses a guided discovery approach that combines both direct instruction using animated audio-visuals and experiential learning via manipulatable interactive screens that simulate a locally relevant real-world application.

The prototype was evaluated for usability and engagement using think-aloud tests with students from villages in Rajasthan. After that, they were asked applicative questions in the form of a real-life scenario. This preliminary testing indicated a positive impact of interactivity on improving engagement with content. The self-paced learning style also allowed them to refer back to and replay the content till the student perceived conceptual clarity. The testing also uncovered some issues with the content, presentation, and interactivity. Design ideas to overcome them were identified and implemented.