First Week turns your institution’s orientation priorities into interactive, self-guided missions. Students explore their campus, neighbourhood and host city in small teams — finding resources, making decisions, connecting with peers and practising life abroad from day one.
How it works →Students arrive excited, but often disoriented. They are learning a new institution, a new city, new social norms and sometimes a new country — all at once.
Yet orientation often responds with presentations, campus tours, PDFs and directories before students have even found their feet.
First Week starts from a different question:
What should students feel able to do by the end of their first week?
Your campus, resources, safety priorities, cultural context and student needs become the material for the experience.
Students receive prompts, scenarios and missions through an engaging conversational mobile interface.
They navigate, choose, collaborate, discover resources and practise the behaviours they will need once orientation is over.
The phone isn’t the experience. It conducts the experience happening around them.
First Week combines behavioural economics, interaction design and experiential learning.
Timing, context, choice, peer interaction and progressive challenge help students engage with information when it becomes relevant — and practise rather than simply listen.
The core mobile, conversational and self-guided mechanics behind First Week have already been tested across seven education-abroad experiences in Florence, Italy.
alongside reduced staff delivery demands in the existing education-abroad implementation.
First Week is developed by Invisible Streets, founded by behavioural and experience-design specialist Gemma Ghelardi.
Gemma brings 13+ years of experience applying behavioural economics, user research, product strategy and interaction design to services across education, public services and global organisations.
She holds an MSc from the London School of Economics, and her previous work includes projects involving GOV.UK, BBC and adidas.
The first week should not simply tell students what life abroad will be like. It should give them the confidence and experience to start living it.