The Challenge

AoPS course pages, originally created for students to upload pictures of their math homework, expanded over 10 years to support interactive Math, Language Arts, and Science courses.

We rebuilt our legacy codebase while addressing 20 years of design debt by reimagining the homework experience for grades 6-12 students.

Behind the scenes

Most of our student’s time isn’t spent with us.

Our students see us once a week while balancing busy schedules. Homework is typically spent with independent study, with challenging problems that often requires scratch paper.

This product seeks to support these students across our diverse course formats, which include chatroom lessons, in-person academies, and Zoom-based video lessons.

Despite our educator-based product leadership team's tendency to emphasize resource variety, we recognized the need to resist endless iteration on specialized material. Instead, we focused on delivering core features for an effective MVP.

The Process

Leveraging student activity data and collaboratively identifying the north star with leadership.

Weekly nine-stakeholder meetings revealed unprecedented data insights and clarified our pedagogical values.

Feedback loops

Conversing with our students to stay in touch with their learning habits.

Student testing validated our design decisions and prepared us for potential reactions to new features, particularly our revised performance tracking system.

Highlight:

Introducing focus in homework, with one problem to solve at a time.

We made the homework problems the star of the show – with its accompaniment always there, but never distracting. It’s not new to the world, but was a huge paradigm shift for us.

Highlight:

Context aware cards that direct students to where they need to be.

Whenever a student visits the home page, they are greeted with immediate pathways to their homework or digital classroom. The course page is dynamic to homework completion and class time.

Highlight:

AoPS’s resources strategically placed throughout the journey.

We’ve scattered our resources at each week and problem and consolidated them in our library, supporting diverse learning styles.

Highlight:

Bringing clarity to student performance reporting.

We’ve replaced cryptic metrics with intentional language that supports our mission to reduce grade obsession among perfection-driven students.

We’re carefully tracking how this affects student performance and customer retention across multiple courses. While the MVP serves math classes, the project lays the groundwork for supporting Computer Science, Language Arts, and Science courses.