I'm an educator so it was interesting to see the example of an education dashboard in the competition. This is something that we struggle with - every educator has different needs and so it's really a difficult challenge to satisfy teachers with digital solutions for their registers and record-keeping.
In this case, I was super-surprised that the letter grades were barely visible on the winning design. The post-competition design was far better in the respect that it displayed the key takeaways prominently.
The register of attendance was lacking in several aspects compared to the common/traditional way it's done on paper. For example, since we probably need to see exactly what dates/days/lessons were missed, having the data in a standard per-week format would be more useful.
From an educational point of view, we should want to use computers to improve the quality of the data, rather than just displaying the data prettily. It would be better to link together the available information to provide educational insight.
Ideally, we might want to say something like: "You missed the class on X, and performed poorly in those questions on the associated test, so you need to catch up by studying the following", using the dashboard to access this type of info.
Further thought: It would be awful to have the data displayed worst-to-best. The comments pick out that this is because teachers should spend more time on the worst performing students - in my mind, this is a fallacy (under-performing students, perhaps yes). Worse than that - I would typically want to easily identify the data for a particular student, in which case the data would be better in some consistent (alphabetical) order.
In this case, I was super-surprised that the letter grades were barely visible on the winning design. The post-competition design was far better in the respect that it displayed the key takeaways prominently.
The register of attendance was lacking in several aspects compared to the common/traditional way it's done on paper. For example, since we probably need to see exactly what dates/days/lessons were missed, having the data in a standard per-week format would be more useful.
From an educational point of view, we should want to use computers to improve the quality of the data, rather than just displaying the data prettily. It would be better to link together the available information to provide educational insight.
Ideally, we might want to say something like: "You missed the class on X, and performed poorly in those questions on the associated test, so you need to catch up by studying the following", using the dashboard to access this type of info.
Further thought: It would be awful to have the data displayed worst-to-best. The comments pick out that this is because teachers should spend more time on the worst performing students - in my mind, this is a fallacy (under-performing students, perhaps yes). Worse than that - I would typically want to easily identify the data for a particular student, in which case the data would be better in some consistent (alphabetical) order.