Case study · Full course design & development
Concord Christian School needed a complete high school Health & Wellness course for Fall 2026. I designed and built all of it: the brand system, 16 weekly Articulate Rise modules, custom-coded interactive lessons, printable student tools, and a hosting setup that puts everything inside the school's Blackbaud portal.
01 · The brief
The school had no existing course or textbook for Health & Wellness. I wrote and built all of the content and worked within the limits of the school's LMS.
02 · Brand system
I sampled the exact colors from Concord's lion logo and built a small system around them. The same tokens drive the Rise theme, the unit cover art, the coded lessons and the print materials.
Health & Wellness
Unit cover pattern (1600 × 900). Sixteen covers share one layout: white crest, Playfair title, and an oversized ghost unit number anchored lower right so students can tell weeks apart at a glance. Crest shown as a placeholder.
#72243E#3E1223#F7F1E6#B08D57#D9C08FEvery weekly module starts from one master course, so lesson headers, colors, buttons and the closing checklist match from Week 1 to Week 18.
Cover art went through rounds of direct feedback: a larger white crest, fewer labels, and a doubled ghost number.
03 · Course map
The course moves from personal and family health, through digital and physical wellbeing, into mental, emotional and social health, and ends with a capstone on Christian ethics and stewardship. Each week pairs a Rise module with project-based work.
04 · Inside a Rise module
Every module follows the same seven-lesson arc. Objectives come first, each tagged with its state standard code. Content lessons alternate short reading with an interaction every few screens. The week ends with a resource evaluation, a choice-based project and a checklist students mark done.
Rise interactions used across the course
05 · Custom-coded lessons
For Weeks 2 and 3 I built standalone interactive lessons in HTML, CSS and JavaScript. The Week 3 deck runs 24 slides across eight lessons, with a progress trail, objective cards tagged to standards, tabs, flashcards, quizzes with feedback, family case studies and a sorting activity that scores student choices. Try a working version of that sorting pattern below.
Select a factor, then select the box it belongs in. Check your answers when every factor is placed.
Recreation of the interaction pattern for this portfolio. Items are representative, not the exact lesson content.
Students select an item, then a target. It works on Chromebooks, touch screens and keyboards, which drag-and-drop often doesn't.
Checking marks each placement right or wrong and gives a score, so students know exactly what to revisit.
The coded lessons use the course palette and type, so the custom lessons look like part of the same course.
Each objective card shows its code (HS.HGD.2, HS.HGD.6, HS.PW.3), so students see what they're being assessed on.
06 · Student tools
Several weeks include printable or editable materials that match the course design.
07 · Delivery
Blackbaud can only embed a live web page, and Google Drive, where the school keeps its files, can't serve one. I set up static hosting the school can own and run without technical help.
I compared Netlify, GitHub Pages and Cloudflare Pages. With up to 40 students opening modules every day, Netlify's usage-based free tier risked a mid-semester outage. Cloudflare Pages has no bandwidth cap and needs no monitoring, which matters for a client managing their own account.
08 · Alignment
Before building, I mapped every week to an essential question, learning targets, Tennessee Lifetime Wellness standards and an assessment type. A sample:
| Week | Essential question | Standards | Assessment |
|---|---|---|---|
| 3 · Family Health | How do family, genetics and habits shape my health? | HS.HGD.2 HS.HGD.6 HS.PW.3 | Personal assessment + group case study |
| 11 · Mental Health | How do I protect my mental wellness and know when to get help? | HS.MESH.1 .2 .4 .8 | Resource evaluation + wellness plan or campaign |
| 13 · Resiliency | How can I build resilience in the face of stress and adversity? | HS.MESH.1 .2 .3 .5 | Unit test (major) |
| 14 · Decisions | What actually shapes the choices I make about my health? | HS.SUA.1 HS.SUA.2 | Weekly lesson + quiz |
| 15 · Habits | How do short-term goals turn into long-term habits? | HS.PW.7 HS.MESH.4 | Project (major) |
09 · Design decisions
The main decisions behind the course and the reasons for each.
Building a master Rise course before Week 1 meant 16 modules stayed consistent without rework.
Rise covers most interactions. Custom code was reserved for scoring, custom navigation and layouts Rise blocks can't produce.
Major projects offer a personal plan or a community campaign, so students apply the same skills in the form that fits them.
Mental health lessons include trusted adults, school counselors and the 988 Lifeline directly in the lesson content as well as in the resource list.
The school runs its own Cloudflare account, so the course doesn't depend on me to stay online.
Stewardship framing runs through the course, while every week still maps to state standards.
Tools