Leiden University

In collaboration with two psychology professors at Leiden University, Zooma revamped Family Dinner. This platform allows students to practice the material covered in their courses. We adapted their existing approach into a responsive website with a completely new visual design, focusing on the students’ learning experience and course management by instructors.

The project includes a website with an integrated CMS and a login via SURFconext. Students practice critical thinking, while instructors manage the course materials and access. Security by design is at the core of the system: we store as little personal data as possible and use anonymous identifiers in exports.

Family Dinner website

Seated at a “family dinner” table, students practice recognizing fallacies and types of reasoning. Thanks to the responsive design, this can be done on both desktop and mobile devices. They answer questions using images, receive explanations for the answer options, and can retake exercises. Their personal scores, broken down by chapter and topic, show which material still needs attention in preparation for the exam.

Zooma created the platform's complete visual design, including a new logo that plays on the family dinner theme. Apart from the images in the questions, we designed everything ourselves.

CMS for instructors and professors

Using the CMS, instructors and professors set up their courses and grant students access to the corresponding practice materials. Administrators prepare chapters in a library, which instructors can then tailor to their own preferences without changing the original in the library. Chapters become available at scheduled times. This way, the course content evolves alongside the curriculum, and students can practice the topics being covered.

We’ve also made managing course materials a practical process. Instructors import entire chapters via CSV, including questions, answer choices, feedback, and images. In addition, they can export results for statistical analysis—for example, to identify which questions are frequently answered incorrectly.

Wherever text can be configured in the CMS, such as questions, answer choices and feedback, there is a language switch. This way, the platform supports both the static texts and the content in Dutch and English.

Onze samenwerking met Zooma was vanaf het begin heel prettig. Ze werken snel, efficiënt en doelgericht, in een tempo en met een werkwijze die voor ons verfrissend was ten opzichte van wat wij binnen een universitaire organisatie gewend zijn. Het team begreep direct de visie die wij hadden met de Family Dinner-app, en wist deze snel en op een slimme manier toe te passen. De meetings waren altijd scherp en constructief, en het eindresultaat vinden we echt super: de Family Dinner-app is iets wat wij met trots presenteren aan (potentiële) partners, stakeholders, en natuurlijk onze studenten. We zien ook nog veel kansen voor de toekomst in samenwerking met anderen die kritisch denken onderwijzen, en kijken er dan ook naar uit om samen met Zooma verder te bouwen aan de volgende stappen van dit project.

Dr. Zsuzsika Sjoerds & Dr. Sebo Uithol - Professoren cognitieve psychologie van Universiteit Leiden

Building together

We started with a short sprint 0, during which we worked out the structure and designs. During development, we held daily stand-ups, maintained close contact with the client, and conducted joint testing right up until the launch. Family Dinner has been in use in education since early September. The goal is to roll out the platform at other universities as well. A great educational project with ambitious partners!