Stellar – Summative Assessment Tool
An interactive grading tool that gives educators a quick, simple and transparent way to assess challenge based learning.
About Stellar
The concept for Stellar was developed by Daydream Believers, a group of passionate, award-winning educators, employers and students who came together to put creativity at the heart of education. Daydream Believers have created a bank of free online resources suitable for anyone looking to introduce creativity, critical thinking and problem-solving into their learning space. The aim of this project was to develop a summative assessment tool called Stellar, in the form of a web application.
Stellar is a digital assessment grading tool that helps educators working on Daydream Believer’s Creative Thinking Qualifications to mark their students’ work quickly, effectively and consistently. The overall goal is to take the pain out of marking student projects so educators can focus on giving more constructive feedback to their students and improve transparency on the progress towards achieving the desired learning outcomes.
This is a team who will collaborate with you, are invested in creating a good experience. They share the process with you and will be as invested in the product as you are. Digital projects are challenging, and often something you think is going straightforward isn’t. GearedApp were able to help us navigate this.
Marking Made Easy
The goal of this project was to make the assessment easy for educators. Daydream Believers had already developed a working prototype using excel, and we collaborated with the team to reimagine this into a digital platform that was easy to use and scalable.
We built an assessment dashboard, built on top of an annual subscription model, that provided teachers access to the tool and help them reduce themarking time by half.
Interactive Marking
Teachers can use a sliding scale to mark different learning outcomes within a project. As they mark, Stellar calculates averages and shows grades in real-time. It displays summative feedback from that qualification’s rubric, giving educators all the information they need to assess fairly and efficiently.
The data is also visualised in a corresponding colour-coded spider diagram to easily show which areas the student needs more support with and progress over time throughout the course.
Manage Classes and Projects
Educators can easily create classes and projects all from one dashboard. Multiple projects can be ran for each class, giving teachers the ability to oversee students’ progress across different areas.
CSV upload features help teachers quickly onboard a new class and start marking. And when ready to send feedback, a report can be downloaded for each student.
Choosing the Tech Stack
We used React to build this web app as it is a modern and well-known framework with an excellent developer community. We took advantage of Tailwind UI which helped us deliver an accessible and polished dashboard.
Using Google Firebase helped us to build a comprehensive backend in a short timeframe, while also reducing the budget for the client.
The Outcome
At the start of this project, the marking creative projects was a lengthy, manual process, involving spreadsheets of data, complex marking criteria, and wasted time manually creating reports for each student.
The end result is an easy to use dashboard that takes the pain out of the marking process for design educators. With much of the process automated, teachers can now focus on providing insightful and constructive feedback to their students.
Stellar has been created to mark all learning outcomes from Daydream Believers Creative Thinking Qualification for SCQF Levels 5 & 6. In time Daydream Believers plan to provide this tool for other courses centred around challenge-based learning.
