The challenge

Bossier Parish Community College (BPCC), a two-year community college located in Northwest Louisiana, is one of the fastest growing community colleges in the nation, according to Community College Week.

The college received a grant from the state of Louisiana to explore gamified learning, and called on Blue Sequoyah Technologies to help. The solution needed to be a native iOS and Android mobile app, as well as a mobile and desktop website.

In short, the University needed to create a way for students to more easily remediate into and out of courses. They also wanted to provide the general public with free college-level courses while also informing them about their great institution.

Though the learning was strictly for educational purposes (not tied to course credits), enrolled students needed a way to be auto-enrolled in specific courses so their instructors could grade open-ended (essay style) questions to provide a top notch virtual classroom experience. Instructors needed to be able to easily load class rosters, manage enrollments, and most importantly, build their course content. That would include course videos, downloadable resources, pre-assessments, and more. The quiz content had to be able to handle multiple choice and essay questions, and provide a math equation editor. And students needed to be able to easily write equations out and upload via their mobile phone camera, or use a math equation editor to build their answers on-screen.

And it needed to be multilingual. Easy!

Bossier Parish Community College

Industry

  • Schools and universities

Project timeline

  • In-progress

Blue Sequoyah Technologies services

  • API integrations
  • Bandwidth and traffic analysis
  • CMS development
  • Github source code repository management
  • Rapid prototyping
  • Responsive markup with SCSS
  • Technical research, consulting
  • User experience strategy and design
  • User interface design
  • Web app hosting

The result

In a relatively short period of time, we were able to use tools like InVision to create a user experience prototype from our user interfaces designed in Sketch. This rapid prototyping gave BPCC a much better idea of what the real app would look and feel like.

While the prototyping was in process, we designed and built a REST API that would house all the business logic and data based on the requirements we had gathered with BPCC, and the results of the prototyping exercise. We then built out the mobile student experience with Angular and Ionic, which was modified to also work in a mobile and desktop web browser. The apps were distributed to alpha testers directly through the iOS App Store and Google Play Store.

The alpha test was very well received and we're all extremely excited with continuing the build as we code the quiz/gaming and administrative features. We'll update this case study as progress is made.

Summary

  • Mobile app UI and UX design
  • Rapid prototyping to ensure a great UX and inform the build
  • REST API hosted built with ASP.NET MVC, hosted in our Amazon environment
  • Native mobile apps for iOS and Android built with Angular and Ionic
  • Even delivered an iPad compatible app at no extra charge!
  • Extremely happy instructors and students!