Kinetic Classroom
How growing up Filipino-American made me a sharper researcher, and why that changed what we built.
ROLE
Product Designer
TEAM
8 Team Members
SKILLS
Concept Validation
Ideation
UX/UI Design
Product Research
Why this Problem was Personal
My mom is the user.
Before I opened Figma or wrote a single research question, I already had context most designers on a team like this wouldn't have. I grew up hearing it.
My mom grew up in Marinduque, a remote island in the Philippines. School existed but resources were thin, and getting a degree meant putting in effort well beyond what most students deal with. She did it anyway. My parents talked about education as a long, physical commitment just to get there. If you didn't care enough to make the trip, you'd end up nowhere. Showing up was already the first test.
That context didn't come from a research brief. I brought it into the room, and it changed the questions I asked, the assumptions I pushed back on, and what we ultimately built.
Solution
Offline mode was my pitch!
Most of the team's early thinking centered on improving the live Google Classroom experience: better notifications, smarter assignment tracking, AI study tools on top of what already existed. All reasonable. None of it solved the core problem. What happens when there's no connection?
My pitch was straightforward. We already had access to Google's infrastructure through the ConnectED partnership. Instead of building on top of a live feed, we could build a system modeled on what Google Classroom already offered, redesigned specifically for asynchronous remote learning. Assignments, materials, and feedback that downloaded when connection was available and stayed accessible offline.
Features that felt optional became essential. The translation button stopped being a nice-to-have and became critical for a student working through downloaded materials without anyone.
The goal wasn't to build a better version of Google Classroom. It was to build a version that worked for students who couldn't afford for it to fail.
Screen Concepts
Project Overview
Students download assignments, readings, and materials while connected. A persistent offline badge lives in the nav at all times so there is no guessing whether you are on a live or cached version. When connection returns, sync happens in the background. The interface never asks the student to think about connectivity.
Not every student has a teacher available at 9pm. The Gemini integration offers four study modes: spaced repetition, flashcards, practice tests, and an AI tutor that adapts to subject, grade level, and prior performance. The goal was to give every student access to the kind of support that used to require resources most rural families do not have.
The translation button was not in the brief. It came from understanding that language access is a barrier that hits younger and more rural students hardest. In a physical classroom, a teacher fills that gap in real time. In an offline environment, the interface has to.
Assignments are filterable by status and type. A progress ring shows a student where they stand in the course at a glance. Learning in isolation is hard to sustain, and making progress visible was a deliberate decision to give students a reason to keep going when nobody is checking in.
We actually won 2nd Place!
Out of all teams in the KMP program, our solution placed 2nd. But what I took away had less to do with the ranking and more to do with what happens when a designer has actual proximity to the problem.
I asked better questions because I already knew which details mattered. The offline pitch came from understanding the constraint from the inside, not from a secondary research report.
Design that doesn't account for people furthest from the center of the room will always optimize for the wrong things.
What I'd do differently.
Part of this project overlapped with a semester I spent studying in South Korea. Different time zone, seven-person team, fully async. I got better at working that way. But looking back, I held onto my research insights too long. I synthesized them for the team at the presentation stage instead of building a shared doc from the start.
The personal context was useful. It would have been more useful earlier, structured as research rather than something I presented at the end.