Inspiration
We recognized a considerable inefficiency/disconnect within the way that university tutor centers and course office hours are facilitated (from the tutor onboarding process to issues of understaffing/unreliability, rigid hours, and slow turnover rates).
What it does
We streamline the process of matching those who need academic support with qualified peers who can provide such services, by immensely increasing the amount of flexibility both tutors and students possess (in terms of setting availability, requesting lessons, selecting tutors), addressing the issue of understaffed office hours/tutor centers through ease of onboarding and flexible work hours, as well as ensuring that our quality educational services are accessible to all students through financial backing of partner schools.
Tutees can select from a variety of peer tutors in their respective course areas, based on ratings, hourly rates, and availability. While tutoring centers may take a few days to connect you with a tutor, Tuut can connect you with a tutor and initiate a virtual lesson, not only within the same day, or within hours, but in less than a minute. All it takes is a tutee to request a quick lesson with any tutor currently online (who are already set up in a virtual meeting environment of their choice), at which point the tutee can immediately enter the room and the lesson can begin.
Tutors can set their wages (under a tiered cap system which rewards tutors with more experience and higher ratings), set their availability (they can be paired with a tutee and begin tutoring within the next minute if they choose so), to ensure even qualified peer tutors with minimal time availability can still provide academic support to our customers.
How we built it
After conceptualizing the functionality of our web application, we constructed wireframes and flowcharts, to guide our implementation of the idea, which involved the combination of a React-based front-end and Argon Dashboard framework, with a Django back-end.
Challenges we ran into
Challenges we faced over the course of our 36 hours together included constantly evolving our program to accommodate new features and to match our evolving vision for how to improve customers’ interactions with the application. Other inevitable challenges included finding our own niches within the group (especially with a wide breadth of specialties and experience levels) and resolving code bugs.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We’re proud of how far we’ve developed an initial thought into a product with the potential to revolutionize the academic experiences of university students around the world.
What we learned
With the combined force of two sophomores and two freshmen, we were made aware of the ability and power each one of us holds to impact the community at large and improve people’s lives, and furthermore, that the best inspiration often comes from personal experiences.
What's next for Tuut
Yale is just the beginning of our journey to redefine accessible tutoring. As our user base expands right here at Yale, and we have time to test and adjust our business model, we plan to expand the reach of our services to other universities, to ensure that we can provide our services to as many students as possible.
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