Tinkercad is a free app for 3D design, electronics, and coding used by millions of students and creative innovators worldwide.
• Goal: Use achievements badges to motivate students to learn new skills in Tinkercad and position Tinkercad as the leader in Design & Make.
• Time: Started Feb 2024, design phase ~ 1.5 months, launched in August 2024.
• Role: Research and ideation, detailed specs and UI for in-app workflows, custom illustration for the badge icons, marketing page layouts.
Why badges?
The Tinkercad team noticed that many members of our community were already informally tracking and sharing their achievements. Some dedicated Tinkerers even made their own virtual trophy cases to show off their awards! We know in-app achievements can be incredibly powerful and motivating and felt there was a lot of potential here to enhance the Tinkercad experience.
Teachers also suggested we consider the value of achievements:
"The motivation of perhaps winning a prize encourages kids to sign up. If you could provide small prizes for challenges, I think I might get more buy in."
"Reward through virtual badges and certificates to motivate the learners."
Project goals
• Improve in-app learning and onboarding by motivating students to complete tutorials and explore new features
• Increase ongoing engagement and sense of accomplishment for reaching milestones
• Introduce design and make skills and STEM learning goals for career readiness
• Make Tinkercad more fun!
Research
I started by researching other apps with strong achievements systems to get a better sense of the different types of structures and options we might consider. For instance, there are one-time badges vs. repeatable badges. There are badges that you can earn anytime vs. badges that are time constrained. Some badges can be automated while others are manually awarded in real life.
Brainstorming
Next I led an internal workshop where the team came together to brainstorm ideas for fun impactful badges for Tinkercad. We reviewed the high level goals and research insights and then broke into groups for some broad ideation.
Direction
After a lot of thought and discussion, the team decided to launch with 12 badges to start, focusing on design and make skills. These badges map the skills students are learning today in Tinkercad with possible future professional skills and career paths. Some of the skills are hard skills like using a 3D printer and others are soft skills like being a good communicator.
Badge ideation
Many of the successful achievement systems we looked at had strong, compelling visual designs so the overall final aesthetic of our badges was very important. Additionally, stakeholders wanted these badges to double as marketing tools to help improve recognition of both Tinkercad and the parent brand Autodesk. I spent a lot of time brainstorming visual badge styles to try to get the balance right between the two brands without sacrificing brand integrity.
Final badge design
The final badge illustrations are fun and cheerful and fit right in to the existing Tinkercad brand ecosystem. I utilized isometric drawing to reference the 3D nature of Tinkercad's workspace and pulled the colors from Tinkercad's logo. The Autodesk parent brand is present but in a subtle way, allowing the Tinkercad brand that teachers and students know and love to be center stage.
In the app - Teacher view
One of the most important parts of this feature is how it functionally works within Tinkercad classrooms. I brainstormed ways to integrate the new feature while minimizing development effort to help us meet an ambitious launch timeline and collaborated with stakeholders to help the team reach alignment on MVP features.
The badges are manually assigned to students by teachers in Tinkercad classrooms. Teachers can use our suggested criteria to determine when to assign the badges and can easily track which students have received which badges. It was important to us that this feature gives teachers control - they can use their discretion on when it makes sense to award a badge or decide not to use the feature at all in their classroom.
In the app - Student view
Once a student is awarded a badge it will show up on the student's dashboard in a celebratory announcement. Students can then view their badges to see which ones they've already earned and learn more about other available badges.
On the website
We crafted informative website pages for the badges so that teachers and students had a place to find more detailed information about each skill's recommended criteria and access learning resources.
ISTE booth
The new badges featured prominently at our ISTE 2024 booth. The booth structure displayed the badges on each side of our logo cubes and we had printed sticker sheets of the badges as giveaways. The initial response from teachers about the badges was very positive. Note: a different designer worked on the booth design.
Measuring success
Just 1 month after launching we already had 940 total teachers try out the feature, awarding almost 6,000 badges to their students. After the second month total badges awarded had reached about 15,000.
Quotes from teachers after launch:
“Perfect timing for these badges! The team at my school was seeking ideas for student engagement when they have early finishers. Badges motivate a lot of our students.”
"The idea of giving badges on Tinkercad is just amazing! Exactly what we needed as educators."
"These micro-credentials are a great way of encouraging student engagement across a range of domains and celebrating success."