From a Monday-Morning Question to a Live Dashboard by Lunch
A Head of Year asked how her Year 4 students were engaging with maths this week. On the old route, the answer would arrive the following Tuesday. On the new route, it arrived before the next bell.
A teacher's question is the smallest unit of curiosity a school runs on. The question in this demo is the kind every Head of Year asks on a Monday morning, and almost never gets back inside the same week. The video below shows the same question landing on two different routes. One ends with a ticket called DATA-1947 and a delivery promise for next Tuesday. The other ends with a live URL shared back before lunch.
Why it matters
Most decisions inside a school, or inside any product that serves a school, are still made on a stale screenshot or a half-remembered conversation. The gap between "I have a question about how my students are doing" and "I have a shareable artefact that answers it" is where teaching attention leaks out of the week. By the time the dashboard arrives, the week it was about is over.
If the person leading design can answer a teacher's question in the time it takes to walk to the staff room, the cost of being curious drops to near zero. That is the thing that changes how a team builds for schools.
How it works
- One terminal command takes the teacher's question as a plain-English prompt.
- A custom MCP server resolves the prompt into a query against the learning-analytics events table, scoped to the right cohort, subject, and week.
- The results are summarised into KPI tiles and a by-day chart: active learners, completion rate, average time on task, lessons started.
- A code generator wraps the summary in a Swiss-grid HTML teacher dashboard, styled to the crowley.nl design system: 8px base unit, WCAG AA contrast, the teal-and-cream palette.
- The Vercel CLI deploys the static page and returns a live URL. y4-maths-dashboard.vercel.app is in the clipboard before the next bell.
The stack
- Claude Code as the orchestrator that reads the prompt, writes the query, and runs the deploy
- A custom MCP server that translates a teacher's question into a learning-analytics query, with the cohort, subject, and date window pinned
- Vercel for instant static deployment, returning a shareable URL
- Remotion and the ElevenLabs Rory voice for this explainer video
What this changes
Design leadership in EdTech is shifting from producing artefacts to building loops. The team that can move from a teacher's question to a defensible answer before lunch makes different decisions to the team that takes eight days. Not better-informed. Differently shaped, and with more conviction behind them.
This project is one piece of a small set of AI tools I am building solo, to operate that way myself, and to set the bar for what the team around me should expect from the loop.
Outcome
Speed-to-answer for a single Head-of-Year question reduced from next Tuesday to before the next bell.
Built solo. No engineering ticket. No analyst booking. No Figma handoff.
The full case study, including the data gate and cold-reader critique step, is documented as A Two-Rail Analytics Workflow That Refuses to Lie.