Development and Testing of a Mobile Application Prototype for Enhancing Psychological and Legal Competence in Educators

Background. The study stems from the need to find new tools for developing teachers' psychological and legal competence, which is becoming a key factor in their professional resilience and effective self-defense in the face of increasing communication risks and conflict situations in the educational environment. The digitalisation of education opens up opportunities for creating personalised support tools for teachers. However, the Russian market lacks mobile solutions that comprehensively combine psychological support and legal counseling adapted to the national context. The development of a prototype of such an app aims at filling in this gap and responding to the educational community's demand for accessible digital services.

Objective. The aim was to develop and test the prototype of a mobile application to promote psychological and legal competence of teachers in order to identify the main conditions for managing the elaboration of apps like this as an innovative component of an educational project.

Methods. The basis of the study is the data obtained by the authors through information monitoring, competitive analysis, sociological survey (questionnaire) and UX analytics collected while designing an express prototype of a mobile application for teachers.

Results. A survey of the teaching community was conducted and showed the teachers' interest in digital tools for developing competencies and receiving psychological and legal information support, in particular in the format of a mobile application. Based on the results of the study of the target audience and its needs, the research team developed a prototype of a mobile application as an "online assistant for teachers". In this article, the authors decompose the management process of prototyping an application, dividing a complex project into specific, manageable, measurable components - from concept and naming to visual identity and navigation structure of a digital product. A step-by-step analysis of all stages of development is accumulated in a "cascade" algorithm for creating a mobile application using the example of the EduCare project.

Conclusions. The illustrative results of the project implementation confirm the effectiveness of the choice of the "cascade" approach to the management in the context of a consistent, step-by-step strategy for developing the application. The proposed approach to the preparation of a prototype can be used by managers of educational projects and developers of mobile educational applications, which will reduce the time and resources spent, as well as improve the quality of the final digital products.

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