Key takeaways
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Student voices can shape more meaningful learning experiences. Bringing students into the design process helps uncover needs, motivations, and ideas that traditional product development might overlook.
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What students say they want isn't always what they use. Testing student-inspired features in real classrooms revealed important differences between initial interest and actual engagement, reinforcing the value of validating ideas through real-world use.
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Small improvements can make a big difference. Iterating on student feedback, from career-specific avatars to more opportunities to explore career interests, helped strengthen engagement and demonstrated the value of continuous co-design.
“It makes me feel proud when I finally get a problem right after trying again.”
Outside a small classroom in Washington, students in a focus group described the moments in math that made them feel proud, engaged, and determined to keep going. These were the very experiences our team works to create and strengthen.
The problem was that the experience this student described wasn’t one we had designed for. That realization kicked off our latest effort to center students in the co-design of DreamBox Math, creating a pathway from students’ lived experiences to the product design process and, ultimately, back into the experiences we build for them.
True co-design can be tough to execute, making it easy to miss the full potential of student-centered design. In spring 2025, Discovery Education kicked off a partnership with the Gates Foundation, drawing on the research expertise of WestEd and the support of Digital Promise. Together, we began a multi-phase study designed to center the voices of traditionally marginalized students in grades 3—5 in the development of proven math tools. Our goal was to better understand how technology could uniquely support students’ motivation, engagement, and persistence in math, and then bring those insights directly into the design process.
Begin with Student Voices
The co-design process for DreamBox Math required us, as product designers and researchers, to break out of our comfort zones to help put students in theirs. Rather than simply asking students to help us prioritize a list of proposed features, we structured conversations that encouraged students to reflect on what motivation, engagement, and persistence in math meant to them, and what they thought the product they used every week could do to spark those moments of motivation.
Two requests floated to the top, including one we had never considered before. The first was creating new opportunities for students to see how their lessons connected to the real world by giving them the choice to select a career interest (e.g., chef, doctor, content creator, marine biologist) and highlighting available lessons most closely related to that career.
The second was offering students who had demonstrated mastery of a concept the chance to revisit the few problems they had missed, allowing them to take pride in their persistence rather than simply move on. Teachers echoed this suggestion, advocating for opportunities to demystify mistakes and reinforce that learning is a process.
Put Their Ideas to the Test
Critically, we then gave those same students the chance to validate what they said they wanted against what actually mattered to them in a real math class. We built both features and deployed them in the classrooms where we conducted student focus groups.
The results revealed a clear divergence.
Some students loved the chance to revisit missed problems and cement their understanding, even when they had the option to move on to more challenging work. Most, however, still chose to move forward with something new.
The career-interest feature told a very different story. More than 90% of students took the opportunity to select one of the pilot careers we offered, and those students were immediately more likely to explore lessons highlighted as relevant to their selected career.
Co-Designing Empowered Us to Build What Students Value
As we wrapped up one of our largest co-design efforts to date, three lessons stood out as key to the unique value this process created:
- Creating space for student voices requires several steps. Elevating the voices of underrepresented students was a major goal of this project, but it required more than just choosing which schools to reach out to. Students needed to feel that their opinions would be welcomed and respected. WestEd’s team of experienced researchers ensured students were not within earshot of their teachers, and had the opportunity to lead the conversation, and were offered a choice of topics to respond to. We promised students that they would see us build something concrete in response to their feedback, and they rewarded us with honesty when we followed up months later.
- Testing the difference between interest and uptake will yield surprises. In our focus groups, students gave us clear direction about what they needed and which features they would use. What surprised us was that the usage data for one feature told a different story. Even strong interest during co-design didn’t necessarily translate into uptake once the feature was in students’ hands. Having a clear logic model for each feature provided the roadmap that allowed us to recognize this. We knew students would need to see the feature, recognize what it offered, and act on it. Once we had ruled out the possibility that students weren’t seeing or recognizing what we had built for them, we could more confidently conclude that they were choosing not to use it.
- Lean into moments of delight. We had designed, prototyped, and deployed a feature connecting math lessons to real-world careers, and we were reaching the end of our study. Even so, we continued to enhance the feature in small ways we knew students would appreciate. We offered custom career-specific backgrounds and avatars as rewards for students who had engaged with their career-aligned lessons. We also re-opened the career selection panel to students. We immediately saw positive feedback. Students loved even these small enhancements, driving a spike in choosing lessons aligned to their selected careers and renewed interest in exploring other career options.
Designing for new perspectives required bringing many teams together from the beginning. We are grateful to the Gates Foundation for funding this work, which combined our product’s capabilities with the research expertise of WestEd and Digital Promise. Experience in educational technology, research, and supporting traditionally underrepresented learners came together to help us realize the unique value of the co-design process. It taught us not to expect to get every feature right the first time. But like our students, we can take pride in what we learn as we continue to try again.
In our next post, we’ll take a closer look at the career-interest feature, including what students’ initial enthusiasm, changing engagement, and evolving interests taught us about designing meaningful real-world connections in math.
See DreamBox Math in action with a demo!
