Captain

How can a teacher immerse a large group of students in an international trip in a way that's safe, organized, and engaging?

What is Captain?

Captain is a multi-device AI platform that helps educators manage international group trips with large numbers of students. Currently, taking K12 students abroad is an enormous feat that requires the group leader to develop her own systems and processes for managing travelers and information. The collection of pre-travel documentation like medical releases and conduct agreements is a gargantuan task by itself, to say nothing of keeping travelers and data organized while in transit or on the ground in a foreign country.

Process

In the initial phase of the project, we concentrated our efforts on mapping out the air travel experience for large educational groups. During this phase, we mapped any travel-related event or touchpoint from the moment an educator decided to plan a trip until the moment the group landed safely back at home.

Captain was born as we mapped the experience of air travel for large groups. This side of the whiteboard covers most of the pre-departure touchpoints. I coded the timeline to show areas where we wanted to intervene or improve the experience physically or digitally.

Next, I created a complete digital version of our sketched timelines, integrating all of our planned interventions and additional touchpoints. It was important to provide a way to visualize the entire experience in a way that separated interactions with our three distinct user groups. View the timeline at full resolution.

The triple-band timeline separates touchpoints by the three distinct user groups that they affect: students, parents, and teachers.

The Touchpoints

Captain uses three main touchpoints to streamline international travel: a pre-trip web application, a international-use mobile application, and a smart bracelet for notifications and interactions. These interventions work together to create a seamless travel experience.

As a team member, my role involved creating portions of the desktop web application, public website, and user onboarding experience. I produced a video for our team that explains each member's touchpoints in context, which you can view above.

Public-facing promotional website, marketed to educators.

Educator on-boarding experience. Creating an account allows teachers to save their progress as they set up a trip, even before submitting payment.

Adding a detailed travel itinerary will help Captain make sure that the international SIM cards and other relevant items are configured to work properly with all destinations.

In order to register students and guardians, educators can upload a spreadsheet of the trip attendees. Captain will send an email to each traveler and invite them to create an account that they can use to submit forms, upload documents, and complete other important pre-trip tasks.

Created by Sam Linville.