Kyekyo

Inspiration

While every student at CMU Africa excels in their own right, none of us can be experts in everything. Currently, peer-to-peer learning is primarily facilitated through Teaching Assistants, but these positions are highly competitive and limit how many students can support their peers.

Still, there are times when you have a question outside of class work that require specific technical or professional expertise: How do I deploy this machine learning model on AWS? Does my literature review look okay? Will my resume work for this job I am applying to?

Sometimes, it takes a fresh perspective or more experienced advice to refine your work. That’s where Kyekyo comes in.

What it does

We named our platform Kyekyo (pronounced: chay-chow), inspired by a Luganda word meaning “That’s it!”, used to affirm or validate someone’s actions or statements. It carries a positive, uplifting message—just like our platform.

Kyekyo is an engaging space where students can use their unique skillsets to support each other for both academic and professional support.

Key functionalities include:

A Mentorship System: Students opt-in to mentor peers based on their expertise and availability.
Points System: Mentors earn points for each completed task, with points based on:
- Task complexity.
- Time spent on the task.
- Peer feedback after the session.
Rewards: Top contributors are rewarded monthly with:
- CMU Africa swag like branded hoodies, cups, and more!
- Certificates of recognition for community impact.
- Shoutouts from CMU Africa's social media accounts.

Aligned with CMU’s tech leadership vision, Kyekyo enables mentorship and community support.

How we built it

Kyekyo currently exists as a prototype (you can check it out below!). We have designed it to visualize how students can exchange academic and professional support in an engaging and rewarding way

Challenges we ran into

Designing a system that rewards meaningful contributions by the mentors and avoids potential misuse by mentees was a challenge. For our pilot, we intend to determine whether the current use of mentee feedback to determine contribution will fairly reward mentors. ## Accomplishments that we're proud of
We’re proud of having successfully created a functional prototype that clearly communicates the concept of Kyekyo!

What we learned

We discovered that there’s a strong desire within the CMU Africa community for more opportunities for students to provide mentorship, academic and proffessional support to each other. Students connect beyond the classroom, but often lack the platform to do so in a rewarding way.