Imagic’s partnership with Science Alive saw us develop a comprehensive digital solution that would streamline and refocus their vast resources and capabilities into an engaging and accessible digital format. The result was a fully bespoke digital learning platform and educational resource hub has been tailored for science and technology learning.
Background
At Imagic, we were thrilled to partner with Science Alive on their mission to make science and technology accessible to every student in Aotearoa. Science Alive was looking for a way to transition their educational content into a digital format, ensuring that teachers and students across New Zealand were given the opportunity to hone their science and critical thinking skills.
The challenge was to create a platform that would not only house this content but bring it to life in an engaging, user-friendly way. The result was the Science Alive Educators Portal—a bright, intuitive online learning platform designed to captivate students aged 7 to 17. The portal provides immersive learning experiences, helping students explore scientific concepts through dynamic activities, interactive tests, and multimedia content.
Objectives
The key goals of this project were to:
- Create a user-friendly, digital platform that would increase accessibility to Science Alive’s educational resources.
- Build a visually engaging portal to captivate young learners and inspire curiosity.
- Provide educators with the tools they need to diversify and enrich their lessons, making science more interactive and accessible.
Discovery Phase
We began the project with an in-depth discovery phase, working closely with Science Alive to understand their goals and the needs of both educators and students. The discovery phase included:
- Exploring how educators currently use Science Alive’s resources and identifying areas for improvement.
- Understanding how best to present complex scientific concepts in a way that engages young minds.
- Collaborating with Science Alive to develop a clear vision for the portal, with a focus on accessibility, flexibility, and interactivity.
Design Process
Our design team worked to ensure that the portal was visually appealing and easy to navigate for both students and educators. Key design elements included:
- Bright, playful visuals to make the platform attractive to students.
- An intuitive interface that allows educators to easily access and customise lessons.
- A flexible design that enables students to interact with content in a way that suits their individual learning styles, whether in the classroom or at home.
Using tools like Figma, we created interactive prototypes that allowed for seamless collaboration with Science Alive. This enabled us to gather valuable feedback and refine the design accordingly to meet the needs of both the organisation and its users.
Implementation
Throughout the development process, we collaborated closely with Science Alive, ensuring the portal met the needs of both educators and students. We implemented key functionalities such as:
- Interactive quizzes, videos, and diagrams to bring science to life for students.
- A dashboard for educators to manage lessons, track student progress, and tailor content to their needs.
- Custom lesson codes that give educators the flexibility to assign lessons as homework, in-class activities, or collaborative projects.
The portal was designed to be highly adaptable, allowing educators to integrate it into their teaching in whatever way best fits their students’ needs.
Results
The Science Alive Educators Portal has been an incredible success. Through carefully considered design and robust website functionality, Science Alive has been able to take subjects that are often perceived as complicated, stuffy and boring, and usher them into our new age of interactive, online learning.
Educators have embraced the platform, praising its ease of use and the range of interactive content available to them. Students are more engaged, with the portal’s fun, immersive learning environment encouraging exploration and discovery of scientific concepts through interactive tests and dynamic activities.
One teacher commented, “The new portal has transformed how I teach science. It’s easy to use, the students love it, and it makes my lessons so much more engaging.”
With over 300 lessons in the process of being uploaded, the portal continues to expand, offering an ever-growing resource for educators across New Zealand.
