SkillX — Learn. Teach. Grow.

Inspiration

Students already have valuable skills and knowledge, but finding the right person to learn from or teach can be difficult. We wanted to create a platform where students could turn their existing skills into learning opportunities while also developing new ones.

This inspired SkillX, a student-to-student skill exchange platform where students can discover skills they want to learn, offer skills they can teach, and build ongoing learning relationships with other students.

What SkillX Does

SkillX connects students based on the skills they can teach and the skills they want to learn.

Instead of treating learning as a single interaction, SkillX is designed around a complete learning journey:

LEARN → PROVE → TEACH → GROW

Students can:

Create a profile with skills they can teach and skills they want to learn.
Discover and connect with other students.
Find suitable learning partners through matching.
Request and organise lessons.
Follow structured learning sessions.
Track progress through learning activities.
Earn points by completing teaching sessions.
Use points to participate in learning sessions.
Build a record of completed skills and learning achievements.

The goal is to create a student-powered learning network where knowledge can move between students rather than remaining with a small number of instructors.

How We Built It

SkillX was built primarily with Kotlin and Jetpack Compose, with a shared Kotlin Multiplatform architecture for reusable application logic.

The project uses:

Kotlin
Kotlin Multiplatform
Jetpack Compose
Ktor
Firebase Authentication
Cloud Firestore
Android Studio
Gradle

The shared architecture contains reusable domain models, business logic, networking, repositories and use cases, while platform-specific functionality remains in the appropriate platform modules.

The backend provides APIs for authentication, users, skills, matching, lessons, points, ratings, reports and onboarding.

What We Learned

Building SkillX taught us how to move from a product idea to a working application while dealing with real engineering challenges.

We learned about:

Designing a scalable mobile application architecture.
Sharing business logic using Kotlin Multiplatform.
Building interfaces with Jetpack Compose.
Connecting a mobile application to a backend API.
Working with Firebase Authentication and Firestore.
Designing learning, matching and points-based workflows.
Managing application state and asynchronous operations.
Debugging networking and device-to-server connectivity.
Structuring a project so that features can be developed independently.

Challenges

One of our biggest challenges was connecting the Android application, backend server and Firebase services into one working system. We also had to deal with networking issues when testing the application on a physical Android device.

Another challenge was designing the learning experience beyond a simple skill-matching system. We wanted SkillX to support an ongoing relationship between a learner and teacher, including lesson requests, structured learning and progress.

We also had to balance ambitious product ideas with the limited development time available during the Shipaton.

What Makes SkillX Different

Many skill-sharing platforms focus on exchanging skills through individual interactions. SkillX focuses on the learning journey.

A student does not simply find someone who knows a skill. They can form a learning relationship, participate in structured sessions, track progress and eventually use their own acquired skills to teach someone else.

This creates a cycle where students can continuously move between being learners and teachers.

What's Next

We plan to continue improving SkillX with stronger skill verification, richer learning pathways, better matching, certificates and additional tools that make peer-to-peer learning safer and more effective.

Our long-term vision is to build a university learning network where every student can be both a learner and a teacher.