The current pandemic has negatively impacted women and nonbinary individuals, so we have developed a platform to mitigate some of these effects.
At skills4thought, we will pair you with other users, so you can learn from them and expand your skills. Develop your skills, network, and find mentors who want to share their knowledge! And, to give back to the community, the only thing you have to do is to "SHARE" a skill that you already know!
Through the process of "sharing" your skill and "learning" skills, these community pairings will help refine and enhance your skills, as well help you build lasting relationships. Let's take a look at how this works!
Inspiration
Our team wanted to focus on creating a product that will bring women and nonbinary individuals together and foster the sense of community while providing a safe space to strengthen and widen skills and knowledge. We also wanted to acknowledge that every individual has their own unique skillset to share with others.
The inspiration of this product came from Illich's (1971) paper, "Deschooling Society," where he explores the issues of limited access to education due to existing political agendas. As a solution, Illich explores the possibilities of creating a free center open to the public where people can gain pre-requisite skills for future careers.
Building off of this idea, we wanted to provide a similar platform to increase access to educational communities for women and nonbinary individuals. Through the use of skills exchange, individuals can share skills that will benefit their future careers and educational paths. With our product, they will be able to boost their confidence in their skills, build meaningful relationships, and enhance their social emotional skills that are important to have in our rapidly developing society.
What it does
skills4thought invites users to share what skills they can teach other and what skills they are interested in learning.
By filling out a profile and searching for matches, we will help you pair up with other users who want to learn the skill you can teach or who you can learn a skill from! In your profile, you will list out the skills you can share to others and what skills you are interested in learning. You can list each of the skills based on the level you believe you are at (advanced, intermediate, beginner).
After a match is found, you can chat with the new user and set up a time to meet through a Zoom meeting. We can also follow up periodically to ensure that your skill exchange process is going smoothly.
Each time you share a skill to another user, you will receive a "Sharing Credit." Every time you learn a skill from another user, you will receive a "Learning Credit." (The higher your "Sharing" credits are, the more you are contributing and giving back to our community.)
Also, every time you receive a positive feedback when you share a skill or learn a skill, you will receive another credit. Based on your total amount of credits, you can redeem your credits for educational gifts!
One last thing is the "Lifetime Credits." This is the amount of credits you have received since starting as a community member. Based on the "Lifetime Credits," you can level up and become a valued member of skills4thought.
Happy skills exchanging!
How we built it
In the initial stages of the hackathon, we used Google Jam Board for ideation and brainstorming. To flesh out the designs and user experience, we used Figma. Finally, to make our project into reality, we used Bulma, a CSS framework.
Challenges we ran into
One of the main challenges our team faced involved the credit system on which our website is based. We wanted to incentivize users by giving them rewards for sharing their knowledge and learning new skills. But how could we do this effectively without making the system too complicated?
When we first discussed the credit system, we thought about combining the credits together into one to simplify the system. The tradeoff was that users wouldn’t be able to see how much they’ve been participating. After some back and forth, we decided it was important to have both kinds of engagement visible for the users as a motivation.
So we created “learning credits” and “sharing credits” to show how often a user engages the community by either teaching or learning. Users can then spend their credits on rewards of their choosing, such as a free Udemy course or a subscription to an educational service. Additionally, the credit system is also a way to give our user more confidence in the value she would receive by checking to see if her match constantly participates in the platform.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
Amid the Covid-19 pandemic and the recent societal events, we are proud to present a product that provides users with a free educational platform that they can partake in while they are anywhere around the world, as long as they have access to an electronic device and technological infrastructure. We are proud to have a platform that can connect women and nonbinary individuals to a community of learners who can help each other develop the important skills and knowledge that they will need as global citizens and leaders.
What we learned
For the beginners on our team, we definitely got a taste of what it was like to take a team project from start to finish. We saw the teamwork it takes to make a small-scale product like this and can only imagine the amount of work that goes into shipping a well thought out, fully functional product.
The team practiced the design process as much as we could in the time frame given – brainstorming, wireframing, prototyping. Of course, constantly getting feedback from and bouncing ideas off of each other. We found that the best results came when we were able to integrate everyone’s inputs, again affirming the importance of teamwork in a product team. From designers to developers, everyone played a vital role.
The best ideas also came when we constantly iterated on our designs. Our sketches certainly look different from the wireframes, which look different from the mockups. Some of our final ideas weren’t present in the planning stages but quickly became some of our favorite parts of the project.
What's next for skills4thought
We want to provide a platform that makes it easy to develop skills and to connect with others. As such, here are some features we would love to add on skills4thought:
- As we want to ensure access to learning materials, we would love to add resources such as recorded lectures and tutorials.
- To make it easier for our users to arrange meetups, we would also add an integrated calendar and meeting system.
- A more nuanced matching process would ensure an equitable exchange of time spent teaching skills that vary in learning curves.
More importantly, we want to see skills4thought make an impact in this world. In the midst of a global pandemic and various political and societal turmoil, we hope to empower individuals and communities that have long been marginalized, so that they may have agency over their own lives and go on to make impacts of their own.
Credits
Pictures are from Freepik and icons are from Iconify
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