Developing locally relevant software in Ghana
Tracking yearly attendance in Ghanaian primary schools.
A web application created for the Renel Ghana Foundation.
The Renel Ghana Foundation collaborates as a nongovernmental organization (NGO) to implement Ghana’s Inclusive Education Policy and its Minimum Standards and Guidelines by tracking enrollment, retention and completion rates for primary grade students.
Project Timeline
May – June 2024
Duration: 6 weeks
Accra, Ghana
My Role
I acted as the lead designer and product manager in a development team with three other students. The following are the main areas of responsibility:
- Management (sprint planning and weekly reviews)
- UX analysis (user personas and interviews)
- Design (website and branding materials)
- Lo-fi prototyping (basic flow and interactions)
Problem Statement
The Renel Ghana Foundation (RGF) tracks educational progression manually and does not have a digitized system. However, if given more information on the specifics of why an individual student is no longer able to continue his or her education, RGF can clearly see which students failed to return to school, indicating to the organization different ways to solve this educational gap for each child.
Solution
EduTracker allows teachers and administrators to manage and track student attendance, status changes (e.g., dropout, transfer, graduation), and historical data through an intuitive web interface.
Considerations
The system simplifies record-keeping and provides valuable insights into student performance and school management.
Displays the yearly student enrollment, completion and absences per term in Ghanaian primary schools.
Allows RGF to identify and address specific barriers to education for each student.
Software Architecture
Frontend
HTML, CSS and JavaScript with React for dynamic components, which provides a user interface for interacting with the system.
Backend
Python Flask application with Flask-PyMongo for MongoDB interaction. Handles data storage and retrieval using Flask and MongoDB.
Database
MongoDB is used to store data with collections for schools, teachers, classes, students, and transfers. Each collection is designed to store relevant information and support efficient queries and updates.
user personas
Understanding a new audience
The digital perspective of users in West Africa has a huge learning curve, and we found that phrasing or terminology matters. The phrasing should not only tell the user the action to perform but be specific enough to allow the user to intuitively connect this to its functionality.
For EduTracker, the two main users are Teachers and Administrators from the Renel Ghana Foundation.
Both have potentially limited network access, although WiFi is available at all Ghanaian schools, and have an understanding of software like Microsoft Excel and Google Forms.
Wireframing
Building the concept
A software dashboard system where Teachers will be able to store information about each individual student within the classroom, and track his or her educational progression by year.
Wireframing
Two dashboard views
The Teacher Dashboard is for teachers to manage classes, students and attendance.
The Administrator Dashboard provides RGF with tools to manage school data and compare yearly statistics.
As lead designer for EduTracker, all of the application’s proposed functionalities were prototyped in Figma to show the development team how to code a user-friendly interface into the software.
The initial product concept walkthrough presented to the client was a Figma wireframe, meaning it was not coded yet. The front-end developers, myself and another student, translated these Figma prototypes into basic HTML pages before discovering an easier conversion technique with React Native.
Wireframing
Admin tools: Reintegration Tracker and School Management
The Reintegration Tracker is where the enrollment status of every student is broken down by grade level and school.
School Management allows RGF to add and edit Teacher information for every school registered in the system’s database.
user testing
Applying feedback from Think Aloud sessions
Functionality, terminology and accessibility were tested as the client tried to use the product without any help or instruction from us developers.
The usability test proved just how much culture plays a role in design.
We needed to rework the application to be intuitive for the intended user and not for the students from a different continent building it.
implementation
Product Walkthrough
Acknowledgments
Professor Sanethia Thomas, Ph.D. Teaching Assistant Mouray Hutchinson Study Abroad Adviser Naomi Harrell Engineering Study Abroad Adviser Ping Neo Sika, Nelson Mandela, and everyone at the Renel Ghana Foundation Development Team: William Zhu, Luis Ferrer and Patrick Kallenbach
