Cerebro
FALL 2019
Cerebro is a solution that connects University of Waterloo students from different campuses to collaborate and learn from each other.
Prototype created in Figma. Mockup from rawpixels.com
Collaborators
Serena Patel
JiaJia Kong
Cindy Quach
Tracy Li
Kaitlyn Li
Sabrina Costas
The Problem
Students in the Global Business and Digital Arts (GBDA) programme at the University of Waterloo take the majority of their classes in Stratford, ON – 45 kilometres away from the main campus of the University. Due to the distance between GBDA students and students from different majors rarely have the chance to interact, share knowledge or ideas, or to collaborate.
User Research
Our team conducted surveys to understand our target audience. We had responses to our survey from a total of 42 first to fourth-year students at the University of Waterloo, all studying varying majors. We asked them questions such as:
- Would you be interested in collaborating with students outside of your major?
- What would subjects would you be most interested in learning as a hobby?
- Would you be comfortable teaching subjects you’ve learned in your programme to other people?
- How do you learn something new? / Where do you go to learn something new?
From our research, we found that there was a market for a platform that promoted cross-learning and cross-collaboration between different majors at the University of Waterloo.
Our Goals
Our team wanted to create a website that networks creative freedom for sharing knowledge between students at the Stratford campus and students at the main Waterloo campus.
We decided on the medium of a website because learning requires focus, and we personally felt it was more productive to learn from a computer rather than from a mobile device.
Our product was named Cerebro, Spanish for brain, to represent the network that we aimed to create. Cerebro focuses on the following methods of learning (which we discovered from our user research):
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Mentorship programme
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Forum discussions
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Live chat (instant messaging)
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Video tutorials
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Live streams
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