The Client
MicroSociety Inc. (MSI) specializes in creating learning environments in K-8 schools that use society building to motivate children to learn. The MicroSociety® educational model makes learning math, reading, writing, problem-solving and other skills relevant to students through hands-on experience starting businesses that build, buy and sell actual products and designing and electing their own governments. Student citizens truly build small societies within their schools.
MSI has a more than 30-year track record and supports to varying degrees 120 educational sites across the United States and in five countries. The MicroSociety model has proven successful with every segment of the population — disadvantaged and advantaged, minority and majority — and has impacted the lives of more than 650,000 children and youth globally.
The Challenge
MSI is made up of primarily a team of innovative educators and pedagogical thought leaders. It lacked an in-house technical team. Like many educational institutions during and following the pandemic, MSI struggled to find a way to maintain the fidelity of its program in virtual asynchronous environments. MSI retained AG Strategic as its in-house product and technical strategy team to first evaluate its model and curriculum and then advise it on how to build a technical solution to its problem.
The Solution
Screenshot of Learning Module
AG spent a year performing user experience research, interviewing MSI staff, consulting educators and students enrolled in MicroSociety. AG also performed user experience testing on a version of MicroSociety that used Google Forms, Docs and Sheets as a way to record interactions among students in a school’s MicroSociety.
Screenshot of Application Dashboard
After furnishing MSI with a detailed report on its findings, AG also recommended that MSI retain an agency to develop a custom software that could act as a dashboard and database for each school-based MicroSociety, essentially recording all interactions that take place in a society through a fun and easy-to-use web application accessible from anywhere by any student or teacher.
MSI eventually retained AG to build that software. AG used the Laravel framework to quickly build a working prototype that could be tested in classrooms immediately. The prototype allows students to start businesses, list products and engage in e-commerce transitions. Students open bank accounts, take out loans from the bank and receive custom payroll payments through their employer businesses. In addition, the software houses all of the society’s economic and financial data.
In essence, the software combines banking, e-commerce, payroll and accounting systems into one easy-to-use package that students from kindergarten through eighth grade can easily use.
MSI has since further retained AG to take the initial prototype further and help it scale, with plans for it to eventually be used in every MicroSociety school. Along the way, we have performed further user research and testing and, based on a feedback loop we put in place, slowly built out new and necessary features, such as a real working stock market where students can buy and sell stocks in the businesses they create!