Ameeda Chowdhury

Ameeda is a co-founder and product lead of CodeArtScience, a startup focused on redefining quality and relevant learning experiences at scale. She is a developer and product person whose year long stint teaching in New York City charter schools set the stage for her to begin CodeArtScience. She also loves to mentor new coders through her role one of the lead organizers of RailsBridge Chicago.

For more, keep up with Ameeda on Twitter as @ameedahc.

Presentations

UX Camp 2015

Designing Learning That Sticks: Collaborating with Users to Redefine the Engagement Problem

Why is it that despite innumerable teens and young adults expressing deep interest in exploring coding and app building, most still struggle to pick it up from the innumerable online and offline learning options available? By collaborating closely with our users from prototyping to now, we discovered that we needed to redefine the users’ problem from “learning to code” to “building immediately useful things with code”. Additionally, we also learned that users must be able to build from their smartphones and develop a measurable sense of mastery over the concepts. As a result, Grokker.io enables users with no coding background to build immediately useful things with code while learning

This talk will be about how we created and refined this continuous collaborative design process with our core user community of Chicago area high schoolers, across multiple high schools, with a tiny startup team. We will address the challenges of creating and maintaining this design culture as well as the payoffs, including massively reducing product and market risks. We will also look at how our laser focus on the user’s ultimate goals allowed us to create resonant and delightful experiences for our users, while also delivering excellent skills acquisition outcomes.