DISCO

The skills-building web app for kids aged between 2 and 15.

Type
Web Platform, Development
Sectors
Education, Online learning
Technologies
Angular, Javascript, PHP, CodeIgniter, MySQL

The Disco Concept

Disco is not only a funky name for a brand but a skills-building network for kids, with the mission to bring children together to take charge of their future.

Disco is a web platform that allows children to engage in live online classes (known as Discos) of 2 - 15 learners, which run after school and on weekends, delivered by a team of highly professional mentors.

CUSTOM DESIGNED AND DEVELOPED WEB PLATFORM

The driving force behind Disco is to allow children to become more curious, confident, innovative, and worldly, through engagement with mentors and fellow learners in highly interactive classes.

These Discos cover a multitude of topics, such as marketing, finance, fantasy, etc. with new and interesting Discos being added all the time, keeping learners excited and engaged about what's next to come.

INTERACTIVITY FOR BOTH PARENTS AND LEARNERS

The Disco platform provides various functions to both parents and learners.

Parents are able to browse, filter, search and view all of the upcoming Discos, to find classes that are ideally suited to their children.

Once a parent has trolled through available Discos and found a Disco which they want to buy, the purchasing process starts. It's a fairly quick and easy process to purchase the Disco through a credit card payment (we integrated with Stripe's payment gateway via an API). Through the sign-up process, the learner profile is also created. This allows the learner to login and view their upcoming Discos, who their favourite mentor is and where they feature on the overall Disco leaderboard (a fun metric aimed at showing learners how they are progressing compared to their peers).

Once it's time to launch and attend a Disco, the platform allows the learner to enter the Disco. Zoom is used to launch the actual Disco where a mentor leads the class and engages with the learners.

IT ALL COMES TOGETHER WITH DISCO

The Disco web application was designed and built with speed and sophistication in mind, coupled with a highly intuitive and super simple to use User Interface.

Disco staff members, mentors, parents and learners all form part of the different types of users that use Disco on a daily basis, each group has its own set of unique features and functionality, which have been carefully designed and expertly crafted to allow users to carry out whatever it is they need to be doing on the platform.

Parents are also able to provide feedback to Disco via a feedback system, which helps Disco to understand their users and their requirements, with the view of identifying trends and common requirements, which are then implemented and improved on the platform.

Parents are able to dissect the various Discos available through smart search and filtering tools, drilling down via topic, age groups, dates and times when these interactive Discos are presented. Favouriting is also a nifty feature that allows parents to add any Discos their children may fancy, to a wishlist, that can be purchased in future.

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MORE TO COME

Loads of work went into the look and feel of the website, with a massive focus on developing the platform simple enough for a child to easily navigate.

One particular area that we wanted to emphasise, was during the payment process. We've all seen websites where a user has gone through the hassle of selecting the product or service they want to buy but only for the final payment step to be a redirect to a payment gateway's external website.

Bid4Bargains was built with sections such as auctions, history, customer feedback, FAQ, and registration. Registered users (Bidders) can log in to their personal client portals to access additional features, purchase ""biddies"" packages using a payment gateway which required a secure API integration, view their purchase and bidding history, and update their personal details.

The admin zone provides an easy-to-use interface for administrators to manage other administrators, edit and view registered user accounts, and manage auctions. The platform also includes a notification system for closed auctions and a single bid page that provides detailed information about each auction.

INTERESTING FACTS

A highly important component of the entire Disco ecosystem and offer to the learners is the actual interactive Disco sessions (live classes). This is where the magic happens, where the mentors share their knowledge and engage with the learners. Obviously, this is all online and remotely driven.

We settled on Zoom as the video platform for the live classes. From a web development point of view, we would integrate with Zoom via their APIs and their SDKs (software development kits), so that we could incorporate this tech platform into the Disco web app.In principle this all sounds very practical and straightforward, however as Zoom was going through this massive growth due to Covid-19, their API was ever-changing, their reference documentation was outdated and their support was not great. This makes a web developer's job very challenging as the development is approached in a "trial by error" process, where progress is made in smaller steps and at a slower pace to ensure that the integration works 100%.