Allison is one of our former Spike students, who started her college career at Brandeis before successfully transferring to University of Pennsylvania! As you’ll see in this video, Allison was passionate about making a difference in Taiwan’s education system.
Having gone through the Taiwanese public school system herself, she was frustrated with the challenges presented by the rote memorization style of learning. As part of her user discovery process, she found that in particular, students struggled to learn important key terms, names, and dates in their Chinese history curriculum. She also discovered in her research that music could be used to aid in memorization of difficult content. With those two insights in mind, Allison launched Populearn, an educational Youtube channel that used recognizable popular music with changed lyrics to teach Chinese history. She partnered with several schools across Taiwan to get music videos into classrooms, where it was used by 8th grade teachers preparing their students for the national high school entrance exam. Since launch, her videos have received over 70,000 views.
See more Spike Stories on our Students page here and on our blog here.
