Skybrary
Today the product is named Skybrary, however, when we started to work on this project the company name was Reading Rainbow the 80’s educational program featured by Levar Burton.
The “new” Reading Rainbow started from the hand of the same Levar Burton, he started to gather digital educational content and with an iPad application was able to give kids around the world access to tons of educational materials in different formats such as ebooks, videos, images and more.
This content was available to kids through the iPad app and via a payment subscription. However he wanted to give this content for free, to every child. That is why they started a Crowdfunding campaign in 2014 in order to raise money to produce new content and to create a new digital platform accessible to all the kids via a web browser.
The campaign was a total success, raising more than 5 million dollars. That is how the Schools version was born.
Over time the company changed the name to LeVar Burton Kids and the application was renamed to Skybrary. Nowadays the app and the content belongs to Reading is Fundamental, Inc, the oldest and largest non-profit children’s literacy organization in the United States. RIF provides books and reading resources to children nationwide with supporting literacy resources for educators, families, and community volunteers.
Websites
https://www.skybrary.org/
Parents Dashboard
Skybrary is a product that provides Educational Digital Media Content for Children at home and in schools.
With an iPad or Kindle device the content is accessible by children all over the world. In order to get access to their awesome educational content the kids need a subscription that can be obtained by their parents.
These subscriptions can be managed in the Parents Dashboard.
Our work
We worked with their team creating a Web Platform parents so they can follow and monitor their children using the Parent Dashboard. Here they can see which books they have read, how much time they have spent in these books, in which devices they are using the account and much more.
This dashboard also is the access point to buy and renew subscriptions to Skybrary, we were responsible for the new E-Commerce platform over this new site.
In this project we worked with Drupal 7, we integrated Drupal to several backoffie applications and with the payment gateway stripe.
Over the years we have maintained and improved this application.
In 2022 we started a migration of this platform to Drupal 10 and React.
EDU Platform
Schools also can get access to specific educational content, they can get access for an entire classroom or even the entire schools.
Teachers can control and monitor their students’ activities with amazing reports on the EDU platform.
This project was able to be made thanks to the crowdfunding campaign mentioned above.
Our work
For Schools, we were in charge of implementing the entire version for Schools, Admins, Teachers, Childrens and Parents to get access to the Educational Web App.
We have used Drupal 7 and again, this site was integrated with the backoffice application of the company.
This was a long and challenging project that has been running since 2015. With more than 500.000 classrooms over the world, we continue working on this application doing maintenance and improving their features.
In 2022 we started a migration of this platform to Drupal 10 and React.
This migration required a complete rewrite of one of the back office applications, the core API. This API was originally built with Java and the maintenance became a real nightmare, making it almost impossible to be extended or even bug fixed.
This is why we proposed to do a complete API rewrite using Laravel, the migration was a complete success.
Bear in mind that this core API is the foundation of the company, all other applications rely on this core API to get information of users, subscriptions, content, schools, teachers, classrooms and many more. In order to replace this component it needed a rewriting keeping the same interface in all the services (~100 services) and to test every change in several other applications, like the iPad App, the Kindle App, The Parent Dashboard, The EDU platform, the websites and more.
The work did pay off. Nowadays it is super easy to extend the Core API, we have a complete automated test suite to make a regression test and validate any change and the performance was improved as well.
