Tartan Showcase: A CMU-Africa Hub

Key Features: Tartan Showcase
Solution Overview: Tartan Showcase

Inspiration

Scenario 1:

You just joined CMU-Africa and just became a Tartan. Excited to dive into the CMU-Africa world, you are motivated to get hands-on with natural language processing (NLP) projects. You have done several projects prior but they haven't had much visibility, and several live only on your laptop. But once you get to school, you have a difficult time finding people working on NLP projects. All you get are suggestions of people who might be working on similar projects, but it is difficult to find them and get started. 4 weeks into the semester, you are already demotivated and lose hope of taking part in any exciting projects.

Scenario 2:

You have done several projects in robotics and have truly grown your skill prior to joining CMU-Africa. However, the projects are housed on your laptop with no backup, you frequently postpone attempts to move them to the cloud since they will 'live there with no audience.' One day, your laptop unfortunately crashes, just as you were set to meet the campus robotics team and share your work. You have nothing to show and they are skeptical about your skills and decide to work with you in the next semester after they have seen some work. The opportunity has been lost.

Scenario 3:

All cybersecurity projects you have worked on are in your Google Drive. You miss out on an opportunity to consult for a big tech firm on behalf of the company since they sent out a request for a cybersecurity expert but your projects were not made public and weren't easily visible by the school.

What it does

These and many more scenarios face Tartans all over, in multiple ways. That's where Tartan Showcase: A CMU-Africa Hub comes in. We offer a digital platform that serves as a one-stop-shop for all projects done by Tartans. The solutions provides and avenue for Tartans to:

Showcase their work publicly and professionally,
Avoid “shelving” projects that never see the light of day,
Create a portfolio that potential employers, collaborators, or funders can explore,
Inspire others in the CMU-Africa community to build and share impactful work.

This will not only benefit the students, but also the school and community impacted by the projects overall.

How we built it

In the development of our prototype, the technology of choice was Flask, a Python Framework. The prototype is the first version of the Tartan Showcase digital database and connection platform, with features such as:

Filtering projects by category or technology,
Notifications when new projects are posted,
A blog section for Tartans to share experiences and exchange best practices,
Ability to reach out to other students via the platform.

The prototype is hosted on Render, the cloud application platform for application hosting. Try out a demo of the prototype here.

Challenges we ran into

In the building and deployment of the prototype, some challenges faced were building a prototype with limited time, and collection of responses.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

For Tartan Showcase: A CMU-Africa Hub, we are particularly proud of the following aspects:

Development of a prototype that captures the Tartan Showcase innovation,
Incorporation of an AI chatbot in the prototype,
Highlighting key features that are seen as needed by the Tartans who are potential users of the platform.

What we learned

From the problem identification and market survey, we learnt that a large number of Tartans use multiple platforms to showcase their work, and lack a unified platform endorsed by the school to share and connect with other Tartans. Additionally, many Tartans are also unable to easily identify and connect with others working on similar projects, and are very much in need and highly likely to use the Tartans Showcase platform if developed.

What's next for Tartan Showcase: A CMU-Africa Hub

The next steps for Tartan Showcase: A CMU-Africa Hub involve completing the building and deployment of the application to begin impact immediately. Future features to be implemented are such as direct linking with platforms such as GitHub.

Looking forward to impacting the next set of Tech changemakers!