Pangea Online

The Pangea maths competition has run since 2013, and every year primary schools and grammar schools from all over the Czech Republic take part. Its problems come from everyday life, and each year has a different theme.

But the tests were printed for every pupil and sent out by post, and the results came back the same way. In a year with almost 56,000 children from 518 schools, printing and distribution cost around half a million crowns. For the competition to keep growing, that was unsustainable in both time and money.

At the start we agreed two goals with the competition's coordinator:

• Cut costsOf printing and distributing the tests.
• Present the competition clearlyTo pupils and teachers alike.

We delivered the complete solution — from the UX/UI design through the server architecture and an optimised database model to the frontend.

The site has to work for a wide audience: contestants aged 8–15 and teachers of any age. So we kept the wording simple, the type large and the colour contrast high.

To test the site in a live competition in spring 2019, we split development into four phases that followed what the competition needed at the time:

• RegistrationOf schools and pupils.
• Test distributionDigital instead of by post.
• EvaluationOf the school-round results.
• Final iterationAnd preparation for the next years.

We tested every phase with real users, mainly teachers. We also gathered feedback from teachers and pupils through Hotjar and, working in an agile way, fixed issues in the very next phase.