Potential Plus UK: Building a Skills Development Web App
The Challenge
We built a web app that tracks the activities undertaken, and skills acquired by Potential Plus UK learners.
Potential Plus UK works with children and young people, parents and carers, professionals and schools to support learners with high potential by helping them to build key skills alongside their academic education.
Potential Plus UK reaches out to learners who frequently miss out on opportunities to harness their potential within the classroom environment, whether that’s due to their social and emotional needs, out-of-synch development (some areas developing much faster than others) or their special educational needs due to certain learning differences or disabilities.
Potential Plus UK wanted to utilise a Skills Builder application to help learners and carers keep track of activities and progress made on the programme. In particular, they wanted to track 8 separate skills, each broken up into several subskills – following the Skills Builder framework.
Our Solution
We built a web app for Potential Plus UK learners and carers to track skill development, employing a mobile-first design to allow easy access from smartphones.
As this app would be used by learners, teachers and carers, we needed to build an app that could be accessible to a range of people with different skill levels using a variety of platforms. Our first priority was to ensure that its functions were user friendly.
We built the backend of the web app using a REST API which runs on NodeJS. A key advantage of REST API’s is that the data is tied to HTTP, meaning it can process different data formats.
This flexibility provides both efficiency in bandwidth consumption and room to alter the app to match Potential Plus UK’s diverse requirements. For the frontend, we built an efficient single page application. This means that users can input information and save progress, without having to leave the page.
The Result
By using efficient and flexible technologies, Potential Plus UK users can now track and visualise their skills development easily.
Our web app enables carers or teachers to enter activities that the learner has completed and mark which skills they have demonstrated by doing so.
Not only is the app user friendly and functioning efficiently, it also uses the learner’s data to display graphs and diagrams visualising the learner’s current level of practice in each skill.
Julie Taplin, Chief Executive of Potential Plus UK, reflects: “There is absolutely no way we could have done any of this without Softwire’s support. They have funded and built the foundation to provide the opportunity for young people to track their developing skills, essential for their future education and work”.