Everyone knows Skyeng primarily as a tool for learning English: it is our main product that helps thousands of people learn a foreign language without serious sacrifices. But for three years now, part of our team has been developing an online Olympiad for schoolchildren of all age groups. From the very beginning, we faced three global issues at once: technical, that is, the issue of development, pedagogical and, of course, the issue of involving children in participation.
As it turned out, the simplest question turned out to be a technical one, and the list of subjects in three years has expanded significantly: in addition to English, the program Mathematics and computer science were also included. But first things first.
How to make participation in the Olympiad attractive for a child
What is the essence of any school Olympiad? Of course, first of all, the Olympiads are organized for gifted students who are ready to show their in-depth knowledge in any subject. With such children, intensive training is carried out, teachers develop special programs and exercises for future Olympiads, parents look for free windows in the schedule of their children so that, in addition to sections and courses, they can also attend optional classes.
An adult rarely asks the question βwhy do we need olympiads?β Itβs trite because we already think in completely different categories. For us, victory at the Olympiad is an indicator of intellectual development and depth of knowledge of the subject, so to speak, a tick in the βpersonality sheetβ. For teachers who prepare children for the Olympiads, this is also quite a professional activity. Through such students, strong teachers realize not only their potential, but also show their colleagues and the Ministry of Education what they are capable of.
Of course, our teachers traditionally receive some kind of material bonuses for the prize-winning places of their wards, either through the school or the ministry. And if you're lucky, then both will immediately form a pleasant bonus on your salary account. At the same time, no one belittles the teacherβs desire to develop a child: often these bonuses can be so insignificant, and the hassle is so tough that it doesnβt cost any money to prepare an Olympiad participant - many times more will then be spent on medicines. So many teachers do this by calling.
For a parent, the victory of the child (or simply participation) also warms the soul very much. When a native child does not chase dogs, but develops by leaps and bounds in any area, it is always pleasant.
Our team perfectly understood all of the above: teachers need the Olympiad, parents also need the Olympiad as a type of activity. But why do students need the Olympiad? We will omit the question of high school, in which the guys approach their future more or less meaningfully and plan to go somewhere. Why the Olympiad for a fifth grader?
If you look closely, it's happening opposite the computer science room π Photo from the offline stage, which we'll talk about later
Imagine yourself in the place of a child of 11-12 years old. While classmates are beating each other in martial arts, kicking a soccer ball from the heart or playing computer games, a fifth-grader Olympiad has to pore over textbooks, because his mother wanted him to take at least third place. Of course, most often the initiative to nominate a child to such an event comes from the teacher, but our little man is not left with a choice: he turned out to be too smart, and now he is being forced to become even smarter. But at this time, he could arrange a βshootingβ with the ball of the losing team or dominate the enemy in the mid. At the same time, apart from the smile of his mother, the words βwell doneβ from the teacher and some kind of letter on the wall, he will not receive anything else. Such a reward for your hard work.
We considered the issue of children's motivation - especially when it comes to secondary and junior schools - the key to our Olympiad. Therefore, the tasks for the smallest geniuses are made in the form of a game.
This is what the task for the smallest looked like in one of the last seasons
And high school students receive nice bonuses and prizes. For example, the top three winners of classes 5-7, in addition to certificates, also received Huawei tablets. Depending on the age group, children receive prizes in the form of copies of educational games, tablets, JBL headphones, portable speakers, and so on. For example, this year we are giving away macbooks, projectors, tablets, headphones and speakers, personal preparation plans for the Unified State Examination or the OGE, as well as subscriptions to Algorithmika, ivi and Litres.
Prizes for students and teachers this season
With high school students, everything turned out to be, in fact, both easy and difficult at the same time. On the one hand, these children have already plunged into adulthood with one foot and are preparing to enter universities. Given the age and corresponding needs, which also cannot be ignored, many take the choice of learning activity very seriously. And when it comes to gifted youth, thereβs nothing to say here, itβs quite difficult to βlureβ them and they no longer need a simple letter on the wall.
We found a rather elegant way out of this situation: through partners. Each Skyeng Olympiad is supported by one or more higher education institutions in the country. So, now our main partners are the National Research University Higher School of Economics, Moscow Leningrad State University, Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology and MISiS.
We also encourage teachers with schools. Teachers for high-quality training of students receive certificates for advanced training courses and small but useful gifts (the last time, for example, they gave powerbanks).
Schools are also interested in supporting the activity of teachers at our Olympiads. For example, this winter six schools (three in grades 2-4 and three in grades 5-11) received music centers, projectors and licenses β our own platform for online learning.
Search for partners among universities
We figured out the motivation of teachers, parents and children. The best students receive not only the realization that they are the smartest, but also valuable prizes.
But three years ago, when the Skyeng online Olympiad project was just in its infancy, a quite prosaic question arose before us: how to organize it?
Since the initiative was taken by the company itself, the burden of preparing training materials fell on our shoulders. We have successfully completed this task. The company's experts were involved in the preparation of the Olympiad assignments, who compose training courses for the main portal. Since the Olympiads are seasonal and take place only twice a year, our content creators do not complain.
This approach also provided us with sufficient room for maneuver: we could make the Olympiad the way we saw fit, and not the way βsomeone told usβ. Therefore, tasks always turn out not only unique, but also not divorced from life. Plus, there is no talk of any nepotism either: all the work is done by experts collaborating with Skyeng -
For example, Algorithmika helped us to make the Olympiad in Informatics.
Another problem is partnership with universities. The entire education system in the country is a rather conservative sphere and newcomers are not very fond of it, especially when it comes to a commercial organization. Within the company, the project of the Olympiad was considered not only as a PR move, but also as some kind of social and humanitarian activity and an alternative for schoolchildren who study English in depth in terms of testing their knowledge.
It would seem, why do we need partners among higher educational institutions at all, when we can close on ourselves and ensure the interest of schoolchildren with valuable prizes? But after all, Skyeng is an educational resource, and we believed that high school students in their later life would need more preferences when entering universities, rather than headphones or laptops. Therefore, specifically in the case of the Olympiad for students in grades 8-11, partnership with universities was extremely important.
How our online Olympiad works
The format we have chosen implies an unlimited number of participants, so the event was divided into three stages:
- training tour;
- correspondence online tour;
- face-to-face offline tour.
The main "movement" occurs, of course, online. However, we also had to organize an offline correspondence round of the Olympiad for high school students, as a result of which the winners of previous seasons received the main prizes, including bonus points upon admission.
Some readers may have a question regarding "cheating" during the online tour. Of course, we cannot restrict children from using Google when completing assignments, but here the Olympiad format itself plays against cheaters. The task is given a maximum of 40 minutes, and they are compiled in such a way that Google will help little: you either know the topic and can cope with the task, or you donβt, and itβs physically impossible to get to the heart of the issue in the allotted 40 minutes.
Also, so that cheaters do not knock out real strong students from high places who claim to participate in the full-time round, prizes are distributed not by number, but by percentage relative to the total number of participants. Here is an excerpt from the rules of the Olympiad:
βThe winners and prize-winners of the main tour can be no more than 45% of the number of participants in the tour. Works are evaluated on a 100-point system (for grades 5-11) and on a 50-point system (for grades 2-4).
The number of winners of the face-to-face round is limited by a threshold of 30%.
With such a system, a child can take a prize, regardless of how many people take part in the Olympiad. Actually, most modern Olympiads are held according to this principle: the participant competes, in fact, directly with the organizer and compiler of tasks, and not with a cunning neighbor who cheats under the desk.
The best participants of the online tour receive an invitation to the offline event. Since our Olympiad is not constrained by any framework or borders, we have to negotiate with the branches of partners in the field in order to ensure sufficient coverage at least across the country. Thus, a student from Vladivostok will not have to go to Moscow to take part in the next round of the competition: everything will be organized in his hometown.
About the team and the technical side of the Olympiad
When we first launched this project in early 2017, we had and courage. Now, of course, everything is more predictable. In total, a development team of eight people is currently working on the project. Among them:
- two full stack developers;
- frontend developer;
- backend developer;
- two QA engineers;
- designer;
- and me, product manager.
The project also has two project managers and its own support team of six people.
Although the project is seasonal (Olympiads are held twice a year), work on the Olympiad portal is ongoing. Since the Skyeng team consists mainly of remote employees, the Olympiad team is distributed across seven time zones: the development lead represented by Petra Vyazovetsky lives between Riga and Moscow, while a recently hired backend developer from Vladivostok. At the same time, the processes for interaction within distributed teams allow you to work comfortably, although employees are located almost at different ends of the continent from each other.
It would seem that some special tools are needed to coordinate such a distributed team, but our set is quite standard: Jira for tasks, Zoom/Google Meet for calls, Slack for daily communication, Confluence as a knowledge base, and we use Miro to visualize ideas. Under the cameras, as is usually the case for remote teams, no one works either, just as there is no installation of external spyware that will record every step. We believe that every specialist is an adult and responsible person, so all time tracking comes down to self-filling worklogs.
What our reporting looks like
In terms of development technologies, the team uses quite standard tools. The frontend of the project was transferred from Angular 7 to Angular 8, and from the curiosities - a library of UI components added to the needs of development.
When many people find out that we have an Olympiad that is held only twice a year, people think that this is some kind of seasonal activity. Like, the team is removed from other projects and transferred to the Olympics for two weeks. This is wrong.
Yes, the competition itself is held only twice a year - we call this half a year the βseasonβ. But between the seasons we have enough work. Our team is small, but we are doing an important job, and at the same time, we must ensure that the portal works correctly while the participants complete the tasks. The online tour usually lasts a whole month, but next season we plan to reach the mark of 1 million registered participants. This means that we must be prepared for the fact that half of these people will come to perform tasks in the first few days - and this is already almost a HighLoad project.
Afterword
The number of participants in our Olympiads is constantly growing. 335 schoolchildren and 11 teachers were registered for the fifth season, and two new subjects were recently added to the Olympiad program: mathematics and computer science. At first glance, these disciplines are a little out of the general outline of Skyeng as a company with which people easily and quickly learn a foreign language, but they fit into the general needs of a modern person.
Now the team plans to reach the aforementioned mark of 1 million registered participants in the new sixth season. The goal is quite realistic, given the expansion of the number of disciplines and the overall growth in the popularity of our competition. For our part, we do everything to ensure that our Olympiads are not only useful for children in an educational sense, but also interesting in terms of participation.
Source: habr.com