created as partial fulfilment of MIT's Design Thinking and Innovation in Leadership for Engineers course
guided by professor Blade Kotelly
“How was school today?”
“Fine.”
“What did you do?”
“I don’t know.”
A conversation many parents and older siblings know all too well.
Little Listener began with a familiar problem: getting children to share about their day. Whether they forget, feel tired, or don’t know how to express themselves, parents often feel disconnected — not from lack of care, but lack of clarity.
We created Little Listener to bridge this gap. By giving children a simple, joyful way to record what they’ve loved doing in school — in their own words, in their own time — parents get to hear their child’s voice, literally and emotionally.
Along the way, we realized: this tool doesn’t just help parents feel closer to their kids. It helps teachers learn what matters most to students. It helps children build the muscles for self-expression. It turns simple moments into stories worth hearing.
From a project management standpoint, this section frames our problem-first approach — we prioritized identifying real user pain points through early stakeholder conversations with both parents and teachers. This helped us avoid solution bias and ensured our tool would address genuine needs in the classroom and at home.
Mission: Helping parents and teachers become more active participants in children’s growth.
Vision:
Our mission took a problem-first approach — we spent time understanding the communication gap between parents, children, and teachers before rushing to a solution. Our vision is deeply stakeholder-driven: we designed outcomes that reflect not just technical success, but emotional impact.
Many kids struggle to communicate what they do at school — especially when asked on the spot. Parents want to know more than “it was fine” — they want to understand their child’s passions, friendships, and daily wins. Teachers, with many students to support, may not catch every moment that matters to each child.
Understanding the current landscape helped us map out where traditional tools fall short. We studied communication patterns between stakeholders and intentionally avoided duplicating what already exists (e.g. newsletters). Our UX goal was to fill this silent gap — not with more noise, but with meaningful child-led expression.
Little Listener centers joy. Even if messages are sent out weekly or bi-weekly, they’re rooted in moments that feel close and honest — like the parent is right there in the classroom.
Our solution was designed to be easy to use, emotionally resonant, and safe for children. We focused on capturing a single joyful moment — keeping the interaction simple and meaningful. To respect families who prefer limited screen time, Little Listener works without requiring children to use screens directly. The experience centers children’s voices and emotions, without distractions or digital fatigue, ensuring a playful, low-friction way to build connection.
This structure emerged from direct co-design sessions with teachers and observation of classroom workflows. The teacher dashboard was designed for clarity and actionability, while the child-facing input was reduced to three playful, repeatable prompts. We leaned into routine-based UI to minimize cognitive load and maximize expression.
This project began with a simple question: how can we help children be heard? We learned that joy is a powerful design anchor — and that listening doesn’t always require a screen. Through user interviews with parents, teachers, and children, we recognized the emotional nuance of everyday school experiences and sought to build a bridge across that gap.
Special thanks to our teammates Rebecca and Nick, and to the many families, teachers, and children who generously shared their time, stories, and insights. Their voices shaped everything.
Little Listener is built with Svelte and Firebase. Audio is recorded using the Web Audio API, stored securely in Firebase Storage, and associated with student names via Firestore. We use Google Forms for lightweight teacher data entry and plan to expand with DALL·E-powered emotion tagging and a dashboard to visualize student engagement over time.
This section highlights our technical and human-centered approach. We didn’t start with code — we started with conversations. Our tech stack prioritizes simplicity, privacy, and ease of use in a school setting, while leaving room to grow as our user needs evolve.
Curious to explore more? You can check out our final deliverables below:
This section gives stakeholders — from educators to funders and now you all — a tangible look at our process, design rationale, and impact. Providing downloadable artifacts ensures transparency and makes our work easy to share, reference, or build upon in future iterations.
