STAR Autism Support: Links Curriculum E‑Learning Platform 

The Overall Problem

Based on curriculum developed through the over 40 years of research and instruction conducted by Dr. Joel Arick, STAR Autism Support (SAS) was founded in the early 2000’s to provide curriculum materials, workshops and training to school and agency staff working with students with autism. As part of this effort, in 2012 SAS ultimately developed Links 1.0, web-based version of its curriculum in order to offer its products to a wider Audience.

Being relatively home grown, the Links 1.0 application has faced multiple issues including the inability to appropriately scale to meet users needs, lack of sophisticated UX, overall user management issues, and an architectural issue that added complexity in the addition new features for customers. In 2016 Star worked with GRAYBOX on the task of planning and developing Links 2.0, an updated version of the successful software product that would offer new features, scalability, modern UI, and an updated technology base for the aging platform.

The 2.0 platform would have several new features, including lesson assessments, additional reporting tools and improved UX and visual designs.

Our Solution

1. Taking pen and paper, to the digital world

Initial discovery of the project took a great deal of understanding how teachers would be accessing and using the platform. For a long time, teachers have had the flexibility to modify curriculums in any way possible, via pen and paper with printed content. Creating this level of modularity within the confines of an application would be complex.

2. Localized curriculums for variability in education

Laying out the groundwork for allowing curriculums to be modified based on region was another hurdle to account for. The Links platform is currently deployed in the US, China and Australia. Each region has its own unique curriculum (USA actually has two separate curriculums) with the need to continuously develop new curriculum sets as needed. Our platform would allow us to redefine curriculum sets and levels as needed, in the event it would become a requirement.

3. Leveraging test driven development

We designed our Lesson Assessments in React and heavily covered it with Unit testing. The initial build addressed as much of the business logic possible, and then we developed the front end with React components that inherited that logic. Using this method, we were able to ensure that the business logic maintained a rigid functional structure that would run Unit tests within our CI, and fail to build if any of our tests failed. If bugs popped up, we write tests for the bugs, ensure those fail, fix the bug, and ensure tests pass.