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By Aten Design Group on
Today, the United States lags behind other developed countries in math, literacy and science proficiency.
That gap begins forming very early, before kindergarten. Connect4Learning (or C4L) is an integrated early learning curriculum, published by Kaplan Early Learning Company, that seeks to close the gap.
When we started working together, Kaplan’s plans for C4L were ambitious. They had developed a curriculum with leading researchers from key fields in early childhood education and wanted to deliver it at scale, digitally, in time for the following school year.
Why Drupal was chosen:
Drupal provides Connect4Learning with a robust user and permission management as well as key front end components – like an interactive assessments interface – in React.
Describe the project (goals, requirements and outcome):
First, Kaplan needed an effective platform for marketing the C4L curriculum. We hit the ground running with content strategy, design, and development for a marketing website – delivered on a tight timeline ahead of an upcoming education conference. We chose tools that favored speed and simplicity over complex publishing features. The website is fast and responsive, built on metalsmith – a static site generator – rather than a content management system.
Kaplan needed a viable product ready for customers ahead of the school year. We focused on must-have functionality first, carefully managing priorities with the Kaplan team according to user research, and launched a digital platform with classroom and student management tools well before the first day of school.
Interactive educational games are a key component of C4L’s mathematics curriculum. We established a production schedule that prioritized games in step with the curriculum’s annual school year schedule.
Games are responsive and platform agnostic, some featuring SVG animations, others built in Phaser.js, integrated with IBM’s Watson API for interactive voice over.
Technical specifications
Drupal version:
Drupal 8.x
Key modules/theme/distribution used:
Why these modules/theme/distribution were chosen:
We developed entity query API, a contrib module, in-house and contributed it back to Drupal.org. As an early precursor to the jsonapi module, it allowed us to build a suite of HTML and Javascript-based online games which use Drupal 8 as a data store.
JWT, another contrib module which we developed in-house, this enabled those games to perform authenticated requests against Drupal with limited scope.
The key module provides a standard and uniform way to securely handle API and encryption keys.
Paragraph module puts layout control in the hands of an authorized content editor inside the authoring experience, rather than in the arcane and complex interfaces provided by the Panels and Context modules.
C4L sends a large number of transactional emails, by using the SMTP module, we were able to integrate with Sendgrid to reliably send these emails and utilize Sendgrid's built-in metrics systems.
Community contributions:
Entity Query API and JWT were both developed in-house and contributed back to the Drupal community. Entity Query API allowed us to build a suite of HTML and Javascript-based online games. JWT allowed us to perform authenticated requests against Drupal with a limited scope from the various online games and a separate Node.js based application.
Organizations involved:
Project team:
Aten Design Group
Sectors:
Education
