Card Deck App: Digital Card Decks for Foundational Skills Instruction
“Thank you so much for the creation of the Card Deck App. Teachers are loving it and it has been a huge blessing and a time saver this year. “ - Abby D., Sioux Falls teacher
About the app
Center of Collaborative Classroom (CCC) is a non-profit educational organization, committed to ensuring that all students become readers, writers, and thinkers who learn from, care for, and respect one another.
The goal of this project was to successfully replace the physical cards and manuals used in classrooms throughout the United States with an iPad application.
The Card Deck App is a tool for teachers that provides digital card decks for foundational skills instruction. It encompasses both SIPPS and Being a Reader programs, which support readers in grades K–12 build skills and confidence for fluent, independent reading.
Challenges
To make the SIPPS program easier to use, CCC wanted to have all the information the teachers need to teach on their tablets, without spending extra time to prepare the materials before the lesson starts.
In the image below, you can see what a teacher had to face every day. These cards belong to just one of the programs we have integrated into the application, so imagine having to deal with even more than that on a daily basis for all the lessons.
Before we became partners with CCC, many teachers were using rubber bands to keep several bundles of cards in place. As many as 20 cards are reviewed every lesson for a single group of students.
In terms of UI/UX, we had a free hand from the client, their only request being to use the same fonts from the physical cards and Collaborative Classroom’s brand guide. As a nice-to-have, we were asked to make teaching more accessible for children with learning disorders, such as dyslexia.
Solutions
After several sessions of extensive research spent on Collaborative Classroom’s Learning Portal watching recorded lessons and reading Teacher’s Manuals, as well as fruitful dialogues with the teachers whose lives we were committed to enhancing, we came up with a preliminary version of the application.
Our visit to Hawthorne Elementary School in Sioux Falls, SD to witness a prototype of the app being used in an actual classroom resulted in a new, more polished and playful design and refined gestures for teachers to mark the sounds or words pronounced by students as either correct (swiping up on a card) or incorrect (swiping down on a card).
To assist children with reading disabilities, the Card Deck App offers an alternative font. Letters’ heavy weighted bottoms indicate direction, and their unique shapes help readers not to confuse similar letters, like “b” and “d” or “p” and “q,” thus increasing readability for students with dyslexia.
Subsequent to launching the iPad application using the Swift UI, the client also requested an Android version due to teachers’ high demand. For this version, we have used Kotlin. During the whole project, we also used Figma for the UI/UX design.
Because more than 1,500 teachers in the US use the app daily, we were also able to develop a web application, while constantly improving all the versions and proposing new features.
To gain further insight into our partnership, we invite you to watch a video interview with Tim Millen, the CTO of CCC: