How do you connect people for collaboration?
College campuses are filled with excited students who have great ideas. However, many of these ideas don't get put to practice because students have difficulty finding the time, team or resources to pursue them. Covalent is a matchmaking application for interdisciplinary campus research and collaboration.
I began exploring this problem space by distributing a survey to the general student body to get the campus "pulse" on the topic of interdisciplinary collaboration. The survey was followed by an co-design session and interview.
In response to my research findings I designed Covalent, a campus project networking application. Covalent facilitates connections between students across the campus to encourage interdisciplinary collaboration and peer to peer learning. Incentive for use is built through a user based skill rating system. After collaborating with a peer, students are allowed to rate their peer’s competency in the skills listed on their profile. This data is linked with campus career resources such as TartanTrak for potential employers to view. Covalent gives students an opportunity to provide real world evidence of their mastery of career relevant skills as well a way to advertise unique or interesting skills that may not be evident through a traditional resume.