Jolly Classroom is a digital whiteboard app for schools. Designed for helping to teach literacy to 4-5 year old kids. It is based on Jolly Phonics, one of the most widely used synthetic phonics programs in the UK and around the world.

While it is a digital and interactive tool, it is designed to keep the teacher as the main actor during the lesson. Through quick tips and guidelines, encourages them to do so while helping them with content, a proper path, and word banks.

To review the letter sounds that children already knows we designed an activity that aims teacher to tap the audio buttons to listen to letter sounds in the group so then children in turns have to write the corresponding letters on the shapes.

The activity is formed by 12 letters, divided into 2 pages. Editorial team, made up of experienced pedagogues, wanted to display at least 6 letters per page to encourage teachers to review the letters after all children has written them.

After we started designing, we spoke with several teachers in the UK to understand the details about the digital whiteboard in real classrooms. Interactive whiteboards tend to be mounted quite low for children sitting on the mat, so we concluded that they can reach the top, but might struggle reaching the bottom.

After testing the app in some shools in Spain we noticed that their whiteboards where quite big and also that they was mounted upper than expected.

Asuming that Jolly Classroom will be distributed worlwide and that we can't controll the device location, we have decided to define a safe area for children by the center of screen.

We decided to display only one letter per page, showing an extra page with the last ones summary after the sixth. This way, children can write the letters properly and then teachers can show all to them.

Thank you for reading 😉