Overview
This pilot project aims to improve the experience of initiating and forming teams around student-driven projects at Aalto University.
It was conceived as a way to address two frequently reoccurring problems that students face when trying to get a project off the ground: the difficulty of finding collaborators from schools other than one’s own, and the lack of awareness of available resources and possibilities when it comes to initiating independent projects.
During the pilot project, we will develop and launch a web-based tool for forming and joining independent project teams. In addition, we will provide 1-2 pre-conceived project themes that students can form teams around, in case they are interested in participating but don’t have an idea of their own. This web tool will be available for a set amount of time in the fall of 2020, during which students will go from team formation to finished projects. Afterwards, we will study the outcomes and conduct qualitative interviews with involved students to gauge what worked and what didn’t.
The goal for this pilot is to experiment with online, cross disciplinary, student-driven team-formation and project work. If successful (judged based on usage, completed projects, and feedback), we plan on following up with additional rounds of projects and extended functionality for the web-tool. Long-term, we hope to build this out into a permanent, valuable resource for students at Aalto.
Platforms and tools
Building a bare-bones, proof of concept team-formation web tool in ReactJS and Flask.
People
Markus Kirjonen
School of Business & School of Science, Dean’s Unit of the School of Science
Pilot leader
Axel Juslin
School of Business, Department of Marketing
Student marketing
Ville Rintala
IT Services (Collaboration Technologies Solution Owner)
Advisor, feedback, suggestions for integration with Aalto’s IT services
