To improve road safety and reduce congestion around school gates, Waka Kotahi needs to understand how young children get to school. It’s a simple question, but difficult to answer. The project began in 2019 - before COVID-19. At the outset of the project we worked with the road safety team, teachers and children to explore how the question could be answered. This exploration covered a wide range of digital and non-digital solutions: including the idea that we could microchip children then track them using GPS. But seriously, the list of potential options was long and so we decided to develop guiding principles for the project.

These principles gave us guide rails: we needed a solution that enabled children to input the data, that produced secure and meaningful data, and that teachers wanted to have in their classrooms. Our strategy was to validate the approach in three stages: the first was to design a system that children as young as 7 could use, regardless of language capability. The second stage was to design a system that teachers could set up in a classroom for students to use. The third phase was to pilot the product with real teachers, in real schools, collecting real travel data from real students. We called that phase: will it survive in the classroom?

To scale in such a way that it could be adopted by all schools in the country, we realised that the solution needed to be digital. We began the process of designing an online system that students interact with each morning to enter how they got to school. We also helped Waka Kotahi develop a brief and procure a technology partner.

The project has been running for nearly three years and has been significantly reshaped by COVID-19 in two significant ways: we did a lot of our research and testing remotely, and how teachers and students expect to use technology is fundamentally different to when we started in 2019. Before we moved from one stage of the project to the next, we created prototypes and ran pass/fail tests to ensure we were still on the right path.

At the beginning of 2021, we failed our first attempt at making the product easy for teachers to use. Our system was too complicated and fixated on data purity - which resulted in collecting no data. We had to make everything easier and “more like Zoom” if we wanted teachers and students to use the system.

Over the course of 2021 we redesigned, retested and rebuilt a prototype that was based on a fundamentally different paradigm. It was driven by the principle that ‘any data is better than no data’. It was also focussed on providing benefits to teachers, who are ultimately the gatekeepers to the classrooms.

In March 2022, a successful trial was run in schools - it worked! The product survived and generated useful travel data and insights for Waka Kotahi and partners. This was a significant milestone - we had validated the strategy with a real product. We had gone from a blank sheet of paper to knowing how students get to school.

The final result is a fun product that children enjoy using, teachers can quickly set up, and schools are able to see, graph and use their transport data. We managed to find the right balance between ease-of-use, security, privacy, different languages and literacy levels, as well needing to respond to changing technology expectations and digital-first learning.

Waka Kotahi is currently in the process of developing a business case to roll out the programme across the country.

Technology partner:

Somar Digital