Educational content and homework exercises can often be composed of relatively dry material that fails to engage and motivate learning in children. By placing a layer of gamification over the top, designed to encourage pupils to carry out homework exercises by rewarding them with achievements, we can prompt increased participation in educational exercises.
Plantyn is a Belgian publishing house that distributes educational resources for primary, secondary, and higher education. Scoodle is the digital package used to deliver this educational material to schools and Scoodle Play is the gamified exercise platform layered on top that rewards students for completing their homework. Students can earn coins for their achievements and use these to customise their own avatar, adding new outfits and personal items, they can send stickers to classmates, and they can earn rewards in real life for their entire class.
When we built Scoodle Play, we tied it into the existing Scoodle architecture and systems. All the educational exercises and existing content are delivered by Plantyn’s systems and all sensitive data is secured on their side. We were able to deliver the gamified layer without requiring access to any of this information, nor did we need to rebuild their teacher portal or management systems. The ability to build on top of existing backend architecture means we can use the system already in place and enhance the content currently being delivered by making it more popular and effective.
At home or in the classroom, Scoodle Play makes education fun.
Scoodle Play was built to be a stable, sustainable platform that allows users to access content from web browsers and apps from the Google Play and Apple App stores. The same profile is used across each so that the student can use the web browser and the app, and it all contributes to the same learning profile that the homework is set through.
The student’s avatar changes depending on whether the answer is correct or wrong
Due to current events and the resulting closure of schools in Belgium a few weeks ago, teachers moved their students from the traditional learning environment to Scoodle Play, set more homework and encouraged them to complete more exercises. To date, traffic on the Scoodle platform has increased approximately 7-fold and continues to rise. No stability issues have arisen, the servers have been able to scale appropriately, and the user experience has remained the same.
