GDE - The Startup Behind The Unicamp’s Academic Support Network
Thursday, June 23, 2011 at 1:03AM
I have talked with another startup that emerged from a real problem of the Unicamp’s community. As we have seen in the post about Unicaronas, the reality of the students is full of real problems to be solved and this reality motivated the first GDE’s product launch.
GDE defines itself as “a network for academic support”. The first feature launched by Felipe Guaycuru, a Unicamp’s Computer Engineering student, was an enrollment planner. Everybody that has studied at Unicamp knows about the difficulties involving the subject’s dependency tree and enrollment planning. Based on that, he started automatizing the way you check the dependencies and plan your enrollments as a pet project. Sharing it with the community, other students started using the tool and asking for other features, until GDE become relevant enough to be hosted by the university’s academic directory.
Nowadays, GDE is supporting about 12.000 students and includes functionalities such as:
- The Enrollment Planner
- The Subject’s Dependency Tree Tool
- Calendars
- University’s Cafeteria Menu
- Subject’s Descriptions
- Professors’ and Instructors’ Descriptions
- University’s Maps
- Online Chat (GTalk like)
- Questions & Answers by subject with ranked answers
Each 2 or 3 months, they launch a package of new functionalities. The next package is probably including an Internship Platform, where companies will be able to post their offers and the platform will make an automatized match with the potential students using some Artificial Intelligence algorithms. Some community features are also under construction.
Nowadays, the startup has 4 co-founders, all Computer Engineering students of Unicamp, who are working part time at GDE. According to Vitor Bruno Jacintho de Almeida, one of the co-founders, “our platform has been becoming relevant and interesting to any student. The next challenge is to evolve the GDE’s platform to attend easily the demand of any other university”.
We are looking forward to see this expansion!
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