Project
About
Giving teachers back their time
Learning Lens uses AI to automatically synthesize student data, giving teachers real-time visibility into every student's progress during Project Based Learning.
hackathon result
Project Length
3 weeks, asynchronous
Project Type
Web app
Team Size
1 designer, 3 engineers, 3 business & presentation (7 total)
My role
Product Designer · Design QA & Dev Collaboration
The hardest part of this hackathon wasn't the design.
It was the calls we made, and how we talked about them.
Problem
Most teachers abandon PBL not because they don't believe in it, but because the data overwhelms them.
The hard part of PBL isn't the teaching. It's that every student is somewhere different, and there's no realistic way for one teacher to track all of it.
One path vs. every student on their own path
Solution
Real-Time learning visibility
For tracking progress
Tracks student progress across all project stages.
AI-powered work analysis
For reviewing student data
Automatically reviews artifacts and reflections to identify skill growth
Teacher dashboard & alerts
For timely intervention
See who's progressing, who needs help, and where to intervene in real time.
Learning Lens was built to provide teachers a tool that does it all.
Here's how we brought it to life.
Discovery & Focus
Teachers shouldn't have to chase data.
So we started by looking at what teachers were already doing.
Most of our team has a background in education. Drawing on that experience, we researched existing tools teachers already use and found that each one only solves part of the problem. None of them give teachers a real-time view of where every student is during a project.
Existing tools for teachers & Gaps
Category
Tools
Gap
AI Assistant
Magic School, Flint
Not applied to PBL student work specifically
Project Management
Google Classroom, Canvas, Schoology, Trello, Asana, Miro
Can't surface who needs help right now
Portfolio
Seesaw, Peergrade, Bulb
Captures work retrospectively, no real-time tracking
The breakdown happens mid-project, once students start working and data becomes impossible to track manually.
That's where we focused. Pre-lesson planning was out of scope, and intentionally so.
Where we focused
Once students start working, every kid is on a different path. There's no central place to track it, so teachers piece it together on their own. It adds up.
What we saved for later
Teachers come in with lessons planned. Pre-lesson prep is a future opportunity, not the urgent one.
Teachers shouldn't have to chase data.
We simplified the workflow so the data comes to them.
user flow
Designing for two users at once: teachers and students
We designed the flow so student work is automatically analyzed by AI against the rubric, and the results surface to the teacher in real time.
Student and teacher flows showing how every student action triggers a teacher response.
Design process
Wireframes to handoff to QA
wireframes
PBL requires students to demonstrate learning differently at each stage. The 4 checkpoint states make the student's next step clear without needing the teacher to repeat directions.
Mid-fi screens mapping the student milestone flow and 4 checkpoint states
DESIGN QA
QA was an ongoing back-and-forth with the engineering team, annotating priority fixes across multiple rounds to keep the build aligned with the design intent.
The project ended.
I learned a lot in the process.
Reflection
Three weeks forced some tough calls. Here is what I'd do differently.
We validated with the team, not the users.
With only three weeks, we relied on our team's education backgrounds instead of talking to current teachers. Given more time, that's the first thing I'd change.
The scope was right, but it wasn't communicated clearly enough to the judges.
The judges suggested showcasing the teacher planning experience would have strengthened our presentation. Our scoping was intentional: teachers come in with their lessons planned, and our job was to solve what happens after. But we didn't communicate that assumption clearly enough to the panel. Next time I'd make that assumption explicit upfront, instead of leaving it for the judges to fill in.
The UI wasn't fully fleshed out in time.
The teacher dashboard was included in the final demo but the student status indicators weren't fully fleshed out. That would be the first thing I'd prioritize in the next iteration, along with building out the teacher planning feature as the natural next step for Learning Lens.
Turns out, knowing how to make a decision and knowing how to explain it are two very different skills.