Kio is an application that frees educators from organisational tasks and enables them to pay more attention to children
Challenge
Due to new pedagogical concepts, educators are encouraged to document the children's progress precisely. This handwritten documentation is a time-consuming task. The challenge was to enable educators to create the documentation in a simple and quick way and to motivate them to create this documentation frequently.
Stored observations and documentation of children
How might we give educators more time for the individual development of children?
Focusing attention on each child boosts their self-esteem. However, it is nearly impossible in every day business of kindergarten.
KIO focuses on the needs of educators and children. It provides educators with a better overview and allows them to create documentation on the development of children. During everyday life it supports educators with important information, helps them to communicate effectively and makes it easy to understand children's records.
Key Features enabling educators to speed up their daily tasks
Solution
An Efficient and Conversational Application
The app facilitates and accelerates the administration in everyday life. Compared to conventional administration software, the app has a big impact on the work of educators. All information, photos, checklists and data about children can be collected with the app and are available at any time - clearly arranged and easy to understand.
Organisation
The daily overview contains anomalies, attendances and all important information about each child. Everything can be commented and is visible to everyone.
Documentation
There are always situations in which a short note is needed without much effort. Notes, annotations and images can be created quickly and easily with the application.
The development documentation is one of the most important and at the same time most complex tasks of the educators. The app offers the possibility to create, edit, save or print templates directly.
Process
A Day in a Life
We spent a lot of time in a kindergarten to understand an educator's everyday life and to identify problems. The tasks of one educator are repeated daily, yet no day is like the other. For this reason, we accompanied the educators for several days and observed them in various situations. We were able to gain intimate insights into what it means to fulfil a pedagogical task. Through observations and interviews we experienced what educators really have to struggle with.
Analyzing an educators toolbox and tasks
We often saw problems filling out forms to document the progress of children. On the one hand, this was because educators were repeatedly interrupted during documentation. On the other hand because the forms are complicated to use and have to be filled in too strictly. Furthermore, the exchange between colleagues as well as with parents was made more difficult by the analogous contact.
A variety of forms educators are forced to use
Working in Designsprints
In order to simplify everyday life and to support the exchange between educators, parents and management, we have structured the system in a way that an overview of the situation was primarily given. We have worked in sprints to achieve quick results and to check them again and again for applicability.
Testing the prototype throughout all demographics
Learnings
This project thaught us lot about jobs in theory compared to the jobs in real life situations. Educators are strictly forced to document children education, focusing attention to each child and having an all around overview. Which means they will get interrupted all the time trying to get a task done. In theory it helps a lot to digitalize the documents they have to fill in, in order to design for management. Observing educators a single day already let us feel the pain they have in their daily routine. It was a joy to work together with educators and children during their day, testing prototypes and got challenged again and again since theory isn't reality.
