Tinkercad is a free app for 3D design, electronics, and coding used by millions of students and creative innovators worldwide. This project adds a new badges feature for teachers to use in the classroom to help motivate students to learn new skills and get excited about design and make.
My roles: research and ideation for the new feature, detailed design specs for in-app workflows, working closely with developers to define an agile V1, custom illustration work for the badge icons and sticker sheets, marketing page designs. Note: A different designer was responsible for the ISTE booth layout design.
Why badges?
We noticed that many members of our community were already informally tracking and sharing their achievements in Tinkercad. Some dedicated Tinkerers have even created 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.
We weren't the only ones thinking about the value of achievements. Here are some suggestions we received from teachers:
"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."
Areas of opportunity
I led an internal workshop where the team came together to brainstorm ideas for fun impactful badges. There was so much enthusiasm for this feature and we identified a few key goals for our work.
• 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!
Final design
We decided to launch with 12 badges to start, focusing on design and make skills. Some of the skills are hard skills, like using a 3D printer, and others are soft skills like being a good communicator. These badges map the skills students are learning today in Tinkercad with possible future professional skills and career paths.
I created a custom badge illustration for each skill referencing the fun, colorful 3D space of Tinkercad. We also crafted marketing pages where teachers and students can find more detailed information and access learning resources.
I created a custom badge illustration for each skill referencing the fun, colorful 3D space of Tinkercad. We also crafted marketing pages where teachers and students can find more detailed information and access learning resources.
Teacher view
The badges can be manually assigned to students by teachers in Tinkercad classrooms. Teachers can use our suggested criteria to determine when to assign the badges and will be able to easily track which students have received which badges. We've designed this feature to be flexible so that teachers 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.
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.
ISTE booth
The badges featured prominently at our display this year for the ISTE teacher's conference. The booth structure displayed the badges on each side of our logo cubes and we even had printed sticker sheets of the badges as giveaways. The overall response from teachers was very positive!
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.
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."