Building a maths website for Cambridge University Press

Cambridge Primary Maths is a website with a simple mission: to help teachers find the most relevant materials for their lessons.

It's a task that sounds simple enough. But with three different content providers and a vast array of materials to bring together in one new virtual home, we knew we had a more complex challenge on our hands.

Fortunately for us, we were working with three groups of maths education experts at the University of Cambridge; Cambridge International Examinations (curriculum), Cambridge University Press (textbooks) and ‘NRICH (games and puzzles).

Our challenge was to present their material in an intuitive, cohesive style which made it easy for teachers to look up curriculum details, textbook chapters or activities.

More than a pretty (inter) face

First we needed to define the user experience. We recognised that teachers using Cambridge Primary Maths come to the site with one of the following needs:

Some teachers use the CIE curriculum, and want support in planning their lessons.
Some teachers are looking for an appropriate classroom activity.
Some teachers are following a CUP textbook series, and want additional resources to supplement lessons.
Other teachers are investigating the CIE curriculum, and want to see how it works in action.

These needs informed the design of the website, so that we ended up with three clear user entry points:

Cambridge Primary curriculum
Textbooks and chapters
Classroom activities

Cambridge Primary Maths software gif by Fluent

Eureka moment

Bringing the content together under one virtual roof enabled us to look for ways we could enhance the offering by keeping teachers’ needs in plain sight.

We realised that no matter what a teacher entered the site looking for, they all had the same clear teaching goals in common.

Once we’d identified the common denominators, we were able to build a data model which allowed teachers to navigate to a textbook, activity or lesson plan AND discover other related content that would help them to achieve their desired learning outcome.

Leaving nothing to chance

To ensure a seamless experience for users of CIE’s existing website, our data model had to work on their content management system (CMS) - Tridion. Tridion uses Microsoft’s.NET platform, which also happens to be one of our specialties here at Fluent Towers.

Only once we’d tested the user journeys, checked the content and refined the data model, did we then transfer it onto the live content management system.

The final site was delivered in time to coincide with a new series of primary maths books published by CUP.