RevisePal started out with a clear mission, to make revision enjoyable, bareable, anything but what it is now, and just maybe exam results will improve too...
99.9% of secondary school students hate revision, especially GCSE revision. If you put it into words, you might get a variety of colorful language, but essentially, there are more enjoyable things you'd rather be doing - playing games, chatting with friends, watching Netflix, scrolling social media.
At the same time, GCSEs are mandatory for every student in the country. Meaning every single person in the UK should do GCSE exams in their lives (unless they immigrated here after school).
To add to this whirlwind of issues, they are also super important. If you don't get the GCSEs you need, you may be restricted from going to the college you want, which starts a snowball effect on universities and careers thereafter.
We at RevisePal felt and remembered that pain, and wanted to make it better. So we started designing a mobile app that is for GCSE revision, but is more like a game. The vision is to actually make it fun, to keep students hooked on that, rather than TikTok, the result being better exam results, better wellbeing, and taking the hatred away from the word revision.
We got off to a good start, 13,000 downloads in the first year and we didn't even advertise it really, students just wanted it. We knew it wasn't perfect, we didn't have all the subjects, it was slow, there weren't many game features except a leaderboard, but it was an encouraging start.
We learned a lot about how we can make it more useful for students and are beavering away on those features 24/7, but we also wanted to bring the benefits to teachers, that was our next mission. To make setting revision easy and so that progress can be tracked. Again with the benefits of better results and atmosphere in the classroom when the word revision is used.
Like students, teachers loved the idea. So we built a dashboard for teachers so that they could put their classes on the full selection of questions, and remove the adverts.
Thats where we are at the time of writing, and now we're taking a step back to understand what we can do that will really benefit teachers. Some things we want to solve are:
- Saving time on assignment setting
- Better exam results
- More engagement in revision
I'll keep you updated on our progress in this series of posts, thanks for reading!
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