Omichi

Inspiration

In many classrooms, teachers rely on hand raises or student feedback to gauge whether students understand a lesson. However, many students do not speak up when they are confused, making it difficult for teachers to know when understanding begins to slip. With student learning as our driver, we wanted to design a tool that helps teachers sense confusion across the entire class in real time. Inspired by the metaphor of navigating through a foggy forest, we created Omichi, a system that visualizes moments of confusion so teachers can guide the class back to clarity together.

What it does

Omichi is an educational tool that helps teachers identify when and where students become confused during a lesson. A wearable detects confusion, visualized as fog covering trees that represent lesson concepts. When students begin to struggle with a concept, fog starts to appear around that tree. The thicker the fog, the more students experience confusion. This allows teachers to quickly see where understanding breaks down and adjust their teaching in real time, ensuring that no student is left behind.

How we built it

We designed Omichi as a two-sided system for both teachers and students. Students interact with a simple interface where they can indicate their level of understanding during a lesson. These signals are aggregated and visualized on the teacher dashboard. The teacher interface displays the lesson as a forest map where trees represent lesson steps and fog represents confusion signals. We prototyped the interface and interaction flows using design tools and built a functional demo that simulates real-time updates of classroom understanding.

Challenges we ran into

One challenge we faced was ensuring that students would feel comfortable signaling confusion without feeling embarrassed or discouraged. We wanted confusion to feel like a natural part of learning rather than a mistake, so we chose to visualize it as fog covering trees instead of using warnings or error indicators. Another challenge was balancing the needs of two very different users: teachers and students. Teachers need quick, actionable insights during a lesson, while students need a simple and friendly interface that does not distract from learning. Finally, we had to figure out how to represent an abstract concept like confusion visually in a way that was intuitive and immediately understandable.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud that we were able to turn an abstract concept like confusion into something visible and actionable for teachers. The fog and forest metaphor helped create a clear visual story that communicates classroom understanding at a glance. We also successfully designed a system that balances simplicity for students with useful insights for teachers, all in a visually captivating manner.

What we learned

Through building Omichi, we learned how important it is to design with different users in mind. Teachers and students interact with the system in very different ways, so the information each sees needs to be tailored to their needs. We also learned how powerful visual metaphors can be in making complex ideas easier to understand. Representing confusion as fog over trees helped communicate the concept quickly while keeping the experience approachable. Overall, the project reinforced the importance of simplicity and thoughtful design when creating tools meant for real classroom environments.

What's next for Omichi

Next, we want to explore integrating passive signals of confusion such as hesitation patterns or interaction behavior to complement student input. We also want to test the concept with real classrooms to refine the visualization and understand how teachers would incorporate it into their teaching workflow. Ultimately, we envision Omichi becoming a tool that helps every classroom move through learning together with clarity.