Baobao Feng
Melon.
Melon is an app to help kindergarten and elementary school students to learn Chinese with interactive games.
Why are we building this product
Guiding children to learn Chinese as a second language is never an easy task. It requires constant investment of time and effort of the teacher, the students and the parents. And the online learning brought by the pandemic only intensified the frustration they already experienced.
Competing with all the distractions surrounding a child, video games, attractive contents on mobile phones and iPads, teachers felt more and more difficult to create dynamic and interactive course contents to grasp a student’s attention and to build effective and fun practices students love to complete.
Paying a lot of money for Chinese classes, parents expect excellent learning result and minimum involvement in the learning process. However, in reality, for Chinese speaking parents, they still need to spend huge amount of time to supervise and help their child practice; for English speaking parents, they do not have a way to help at all.
We feel the pain of those teachers and parents during customer interviews. Therefore, we are building this application to help Chinese language educators to generate mini games to help young students to remember, use and speak new characters, phrases and sentences.
Problems
Very time consuming to prepare attractive course content
Young students always skip boring homework
Parents do not have time and/or sufficient knowledge to help their child learn
Parents do not have a timely evaluation to track the learning result
Solutions
Automatically generate mini games with easy input of characters and phrases
Fun mini games instead of “writing a character for 10 times”
Attractive content to keep students engaged + voice recognition to test students’ speaking skills
Regular learning reports to track progress
Personas
Chinese Educators
Chinese educators include teachers and parents who can speak Chinese. They are dedicated users who turn game templates into meaningful and effective practices for students.
Emily Chen is 27-years-old. She is originally from China and has 5 years’ experience as a Chinese teacher for primary school students in the US. She not only wanted her students to learn Chinese, but also wanted them to love learning Chinese.
Olivia Wang is a 30-year-old freelance photographer from China. She and her husband have lived in Boston for 8 years and established their home there. She requires her daughter to be excellent in Chinese, especially speaking and writing. She worked very hard to balance between busy schedule and her daughter’s Chinese learning journey.
Non-Chinese speaking parents
They are parents who do not speak Chinese at all. They will use the app as an on-demand tutor.
Pranav Joshi is a director of engineering in Silicon Valley. He and his wife are originally from India, so they do not speak Chinese at all. However, as they have many colleagues and friends who are from China and their sons also have many friends in school who can speak Chinese, they thought Chinese would be a great second language for their sons. Currently, his sons’ only Chinese exposure is at the Chinese after school and he cannot help with their homework or practice.
Students
Students are dedicated users who will interact with the games the app generated.
Daniel Wilson is 10 years old. His mother is from China and his father is from the US. He and his brother both started learning Chinese since pre-K and their mother will occasionally speak Chinese with them. He wanted to learn Chinese and be very good at it, but he still felt difficult to focus in class and bored when trying to finish homework. He needs more speaking opportunities and more practice to review.
Customer Journey Map
User Stories and Acceptance Criteria
As a Chinese teacher, I need a tool to help me generating interactive and fun class materials and practices, so that my students can enjoy the class and get effective practice after class.
1.
The app should provide 5 – 10 game templates initially for educators to choose from.
2.
The templates should cover practices for recognizing characters, making phrases with characters, making sentences with phrases. The educator should be able to enter any characters, phrases and sentences they want.
3.
The templates library will be updated regularly.
As a parent who speaks Chinese, I need a tool to keep my daughter engaged in learning and help my child practicing speaking after class, so that I do not need to invest huge amount of time in supervising her.
1.
The games generated should provide attractive visual effects, appropriate sound tracks and interactive gaming experiences.
2.
The app should have voice recognition function to evaluate a student’s speaking.
As a parent who does not speak Chinese, I need a tool to help my sons progress in Chinese and to provide regular and concise feedbacks on my sons’ learning result, so that I can have a clear idea of how they are doing and see if they actually learnt something.
1.
The games should be proven (by licensed Chinese as a second language educators) to be effective in acquiring Chinese vocabulary and grammar for elementary students.
2.
The app will generate weekly learning report for parents. The report should include visualized data on students’ achievements, what they missed and their ranking among peers (if any).
As a student, I need a practice method that keeps me engaged and motivated.
1.
The app should have a scoring system to keep the students motivated in a healthy way.
2.
After each game, the student can see how many “melons” they got (0 – 3, 0.5 increment), they can choose to retry (limited times) to improve score. The score should depend on how accurate their answers were and how fast they finished the practice.
3.
Among the whole class, there should be a leaderboard showing the overall performance of the students.
App Performance Criteria
01/
As a user, I want a secure login experience, so that my personal and payment information is protected.
02/
As an educator, I expect the game to be generated as soon as I input all the language points.
03/
As an educator, I expect the game(s) I made to be appeared on my students’ dashboard as soon as I posted them.
04/
As a student, I expect to open the game and start playing as soon as I see it on my dashboard.
05/
As a user, when I encounter an issue with the app, I want to be able to connect to customer service and get my issue resolved as soon as possible.
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The app should provide multifactor authentication for secure login.
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The app should be able to return the ready-to -play game within 10s after the user hit the “generate game” button.
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If it needs longer time or it failed, it should notify the user.
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The app should be able to post the ready-to -play game(s) within 10s after the user hit the “post game” button.
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If it needs longer time or it failed, it should notify the user.
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The loading time for a game should be less than 5s.
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If it needs longer time or it failed, it should notify the user.
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The minimum time to fix any bugs or issues is 24 hours.
Risk and Remediations
1.
Schedule risk: There might be conflict scheduling resources with the engineers resulting in a product launch delay.
Work with engineering team and plan out project resource allocations in advance.
2.
Budget Risk: Because of potential scope change, the cost could change unexpectedly.
Include project budget buffer to make sure extra budget is planned.
3.
Operational Risk: Failed to prioritize.
Review project progress regularly and adjust when necessary.
4.
Technical Risk: Complicated system integration.
Communicate with system architects to understand the potential difficulty.
5.
Programmatic Risk: Legal challenges, communication challenges.
Communicate with legal consultant and engineering lead to understand the potential difficulty.
6.
Business Risk: The product is subject to low customer adoptions or running out of the fund.
Conduct user research and understand user's needs and pain points in advance.
Pricing Strategy
Based on the pricing of some existing gaming apps to help kids (0 – 12 years old) learning Chinese (GoPlay Chinese, Fun Chinese, Chinese Character Kingdom and KaDa Story), the monthly plan cost around $6.00 for one student.
As Melon can be used by a teacher with multiple students or a parent with only child, we have subscription plans for family users or school users.
$6.99/ month for up to 2 children
$3.99/ month for each additional child
$27.99/ month for up to 6 students, $3.99/ month for each additional student
Go-to-market Strategy
Parents and Chinese educators/schools are the customers who will actually pay for the app.
Sales Funnel
For Chinese teachers/schools
Extremely Time consuming to prepare attractive class materials and practices
Melon will easily generate fun and interactive games for class and practice.
Make interactive class materials with just one click.
For Parents
Supervising children’s learning process cost too much time.
Melon can guide students through learning and practice and also check their speaking.
This app is your child’s private on-demand Chinese tutor.
For Parents
Difficult to track children’s learning result.
Melon can generate weekly learning report with visualized data.
No one-on-one meetings with the teacher needed.
System
Architecture
Roadmap
