Academos

Motivation

Around 384 AC, Plato formed his Academy, which consisted of informal encounters between scholars to share ideas, findings and dissertations; they met in the garden of "Hekademia", near the city of Athens, from which the term "Academia" directly originates from. We believe that the essence of Plato's original idea for the Academy has since faded, becoming more institutionalized and individualized, which inhibits the exchange of thoughts and ideas. Our goal is to bridge the gap between informal and formal education, by motivating college students to meet up with the sole purpose of sharing their knowledge and learning together.

Objectives

Our main objective is to develop an app, which can be used by any college student, to chat with others within the same course, university or even area of study and organize study sessions in official places of study, such as libraries or university spaces (example: IST's TIC). As such, our plans are implementing features to produce a minimal viable product that could achieve the previously stated objective. The features we aim to implement are as follows:

A user data-base, where people can sign up by choosing an username, profile picture and submitting information on what degree they are undertaking and which university they belong to.
A system of group chats for each subject where students can share information, organize study sessions through an event system and add deadlines and important dates to a calendar system (the latter being only possible for administrators); we don't intend to allow private messaging, as to avoid nefarious uses of the application and incentivize collaboration with a diverse group of people.
A system where students can update the occupation status of public study locations, to more easily distribute students among them, similar to Google Map's user-based system.
Optionally, we could add a reward system for students that share information within study groups and update the occupation status of locations, such as emoticons, stickers and app themes or even titles (example: "[user], Destroyer of Worlds").

Market Potential

This idea may prove to be an excellent economic drive, since there will never cease to be students and, coupled with the fact that further education is a growing market, the use of the app will last a very long time. Here are some partnership ideas to fuel this project:

Include book recommendations for study inside each chatroom; we could partner with local bookstores (Bertrand, IST Press, ...) to have their books recommended.
Partner with local supermarkets and restaurants (example: Pingo Doce) to build a location based system for eating, since students (besides studying) have to eat, based on which public study spaces they occupy at any given moment.

Expected Results

To conclude, we expect this project to unite students all across educational establishments, as well as being a potential profitable idea, which hasn't yet been explored.