Background: In collaboration with Esther Mun, a designer at Little Fury, and in conjunction with a cultural renewal project for the Gotham Fellowship, the idea for Work in Progress (WIP) was born. We pursued WIP as a side project for about a year, until life got in the way.

The Problem: Project based learning is great but educators have a hard time implementing it in their classroom. This is a problem especially in design and art schools where students don’t get enough substantive feedback to keep their projects going and do their best work.

The Solution: Work in Progress is a project management system that shepherds students through a structured design thinking process to complete a classroom project. With tools to plan, research, brainstorm, concept, finalize, and gather real-time feedback, WIP makes it easier for teachers to implement project based learning and manage student projects while ensuring that students meet key learning outcomes.

The MVP:

• Easy to use UI
• Accounts (with account types) and basic profile
• Ability to start a project and invite students
• Guided project phases with options for timing and content types
• Basic feedback mechanism (commenting) with feedback email notifications
• Project export and archiving in profile
• Basic administrative data dashboard and moderation tools
• Customer support infrastructure
• Secure and reliable platform

The Design:

The wireframes shown is a basic homepage design showing sample projects for inspiration. More wireframes were designed and a semi-functional prototype is in development.

Status:

Work in Progress is on hold at the moment. We continue to love the idea, but life circumstances have gotten in the way.