Our app is a lightweight classroom tool born out of the post-pandemic reality: many current students struggle with pacing, attention, and the social friction of asking questions in person. We identified these issues through stakeholder interviews with students and professors, then used a grounded-theory-method-inspired analysis process to extract five guiding implications. Any solution we designed needed to be inclusive, avoid adding too much additional technological distraction, lower question anxiety, avoid collecting personal data, and reuse the best practices students liked from pandemic-era tools.

Using those implications, we ran an IDEO-style brainstorming session and converged on a live feedback loop between students and the professor. The result pairs a simple web app with two unobtrusive channels, a pacing stoplight the instructor can glance at to evaluate how well students are following along, and an anonymous question board students can post to without fear of judgement. The webapp is simplistic to avoid being visually distracting, while the indicator light is able to easily get the professor's attention when the color changes.

We evaluated Signal in a live review session of ~50 students, a subset of which electing to complete an exit survey. Nearly all respondents reported feeling more comfortable asking questions and liked the idea of a way to anonymously communicate how well they're following along. When prompted, students also suggested refinements, like keeping the stoplight primarily viewable only by the professor and offering a quick “raise-hand” feature, centered around further preserving focus while still making participation easy.