CASE STUDY · SAAS · STUDENT WELLBEING PLATFORM

BRAINBLOOM PULSE

A wellbeing platform that helps schools understand how students feel, and act early when a class needs support.

Client: Tspeaksnyc
Platform: Web app
Services: Product design
Web app
Dashboards
Stack: React
NestJS
Prisma
PostgreSQL

Overview

TSpeaksNYC Pulse is a K-12 Social-Emotional Learning (SEL) and student wellbeing platform that helps schools and districts understand how students are actually feeling — and act on it early. Students do a quick daily emotional check-in (a mood plus what's driving it); teachers see their classroom's emotional pulse in real time, flag students who need support, and run structured post-lesson reflections to measure whether an SEL lesson actually helped; and school and district leaders get privacy-safe, aggregated dashboards, benchmarking and exportable reports. The whole system is a closed loop: students share → teachers respond → leaders measure impact → support escalates through MTSS-style tiers when concern signals persist. Four roles — Student, Teacher, School Admin and District Admin — each get a tailored dashboard, all behind role-based access guards.

The problem

Schools had no simple way to see how students feel across classes. Teachers could not spot who needed help without reading every check-in, and leaders could not tell whether a social-emotional lesson actually helped.

Approach

Make the student check-in quick and safe: one mood, what is driving it, and an optional private note for the counselor.
Give teachers a live class pulse that sorts students into needs support, no check-in yet and on track, so help goes to the right student the same day.
Close the loop with post-lesson reflections that compare mood before and after a lesson, so impact is measured instead of assumed.
Keep leadership views aggregated: no student names in school or district dashboards, and tiered support escalation that mirrors how schools already work.

Architecture

Four roles (student, teacher, school admin, district admin), each with its own dashboard behind role-based access guards on every endpoint.
Backend: NestJS with Prisma on PostgreSQL.
Front end: React.
Exports: CSV for reflections and reports.

What we built

School dashboard with mood mix, alerts and classes that need support
Daily student check-ins with streaks and milestone badges
Class view that ranks students who need support first
Curriculum library with lessons filtered by grade

The daily check-in

The student experience is built to feel safe, quick and encouraging — not clinical. A student taps a mood (Happy, Calm, Okay, Worried, Sad, Frustrated), picks what's affecting it (school, tests, friends, home, sleep, stress, health…) and can leave a private note for their counselor — one baseline check-in per school day. After a difficult mood, the app offers a short grounding exercise (box breathing, a 5-4-3-2-1 sensory reset) instead of just recording sadness, and a weekly self-awareness streak with milestone badges turns honest reflection into a healthy habit. Every response is clearly marked as shared only with trusted school support staff.

The teacher's class pulse

Teachers get a live command center for their classroom's emotional health. A Class Pulse roster sorts every student into Needs Support, No Check-in Yet or On Track — each with their latest mood, recency and a class mood average — while a proactive "students who may need support today" banner surfaces at-risk students (difficult-mood streaks or stale check-ins) behind a one-click filtered view. Teachers can flag a student with a note, open a formal Tier 1 intervention and escalate to Tier 2 (Tier 3 needs admin approval), with interventions visible across classes so support follows the student. A 30-day history drills into any student's mood trajectory.

Measured impact, not just data

The reflection loop is what makes the platform more than a mood tracker. A teacher launches a timed post-lesson reflection tied to a specific SEL lesson, and sees in near real-time the percentage of students who felt better afterward — with a full impact summary (improved / no change / worsened, mood drivers, notes) and CSV export. Because it pairs a before-and-after mood comparison, it actually quantifies whether a lesson changed how students feel. Teachers also browse and open district-published SEL lessons from an in-app curriculum library and export a teacher summary PDF.

School & district leadership analytics

Leaders get a 30-second read and the depth to back it up. A School Admin sees the mood mix (Positive / Neutral / Struggling), flagged students and classes needing support across any date range (7/30/90 days, full school year or custom), plus KPIs — participation rate, total check-ins, open interventions and wellbeing trends with period-over-period comparisons — and per-class benchmarking with configurable thresholds. District Admins get the same across every school: a district-wide rollup with a school selector, side-by-side school intel cards, cross-school benchmarking, school creation and Tier 3 escalation authority. People and access management (bulk CSV onboarding, password resets, deactivation that preserves history) and curriculum publishing round out the admin tooling.

Privacy by design, production-grade backend

Leader-facing dashboards are strictly aggregated — no student names appear in school or district sentiment views, and student notes flow only to support staff. The MTSS-aligned Tier 1→2→3 escalation model mirrors how real schools structure interventions, with authority role-gated at each level. Under the hood: a NestJS + Prisma REST API with JWT auth, role-based access guards on every endpoint, forced initial-password-change and reset flows, request throttling on check-ins, file storage and CSV/PDF reporting pipelines — the kind of guarantees a district needs before it trusts a platform with how its students feel.