The Challenge
American Heritage Society wanted to find an engaging way for teachers to reach students through digital technology. For history and social studies teachers, this meant finding ways to teach historical content and present primary sources from our nation’s past. For English and language arts teachers, this meant finding interesting non-fiction text to integrate into lesson plans.
The Solution
Apollo Matrix designed a user-centric experience that aligned user goals with American Heritage’s business goals, creating a robust educational resource. Fourscore provides a rich catalog of historical content that meets the CCSS and C3 Framework standards. It responds to the practical needs of teachers in a way that engages students.
View the site at 4score.org.
Tactics
Discovery
We started out with our Discover & Define Workshop interviewing teacher from across the country with a wide range of teaching environments. We found that while some classrooms don’t have robust technology access, the teachers have access to at least one laptop, which could be used to project the course materials. The teachers expressed interest in flexible programs that integrated Common Core State Standards (CCSS).
Implementation
Apollo’s developers migrated the existing data from four different sources into a Drupal 7 back end and implemented extensive custom content types in order to assimilate all of the input data. From this base, Apollo built systems for user profiles and content creation and curation. Four unique profile types with different permissions were created: student, teacher, content manager, and content curator. On top of this system, we integrated Solr search. Finally, a complete custom theme was built from scratch for the website.
Branding
Apollo updated the look and feel without changing the technical framework for secondary pages of the mobile app.
Our redesign focused on making the core search and filter features of the app more intuitive for users.
Include and Exclude buttons were included to allow users to better filter their content or ratings, helping users better understand rating categories.
Results
Fourscore launched in 2013. Its breakthrough approach with custom content was met with great excitement by teachers and school districts alike.
