VOKARE
Project description
March 2017
3 years continuous
Education
6 members
Technological Coordination
Product Strategy (in partnership)
UX/UI Prototype (in partnership)
Intelligence Algorithm
Testing (in partnership)
Blender 3D
Adobe Photoshop
Adobe Illustrator
Adobe After Effects
Back-end PHP + Symfony
HTML / CSS / JS
Front-end Unity 3D / C#
VOKARE was Brazil’s first intelligent and automated professional guidance platform. 25 thousand data cross-checkings are carried out so that the student receives his results. A pioneering, deep, and consistent project in Brazil.
Data collection for inference is carried out in an innovative environment that offers the student efficient career guidance support. With a unique methodology, the system promotes professional direction in the face of cross-referencing data and assumptions based on self-knowledge, detection of personality profiles, talents, values, and suggestion of professions most suited to the student’s characteristics.
The platform is intended for students in the higher education entrance exam phase, for adults in the phase of professional redefinition, for people who are retiring and wish to find a way to use their personal talents in some productive activity, or for anyone interested in knowing their professional profile.
When the project was born, I joined as a founding partner of the business and was responsible for the platform’s technology. My first task was to invent the analogy that would be used to make the collection of student profile data more entertaining. After many drafts, I arrived at the analogy of islands with activities supported by media. I then recruited a team of professionals and distributed tasks.
I personally took on the task of designing the combinatorial algorithm to estimate profession. It was a complex task that took almost a year to get right, ultimately resulting in an excellent success rate.
In 2019 Vokare was sold to the Imaginie Redação group and I left the company.
Problems:
Primary Problem: Collect a large volume of analytical data from students without becoming a boring and apathetic task.
Secondary Problem: Create an algorithm to infer the best course options for students using the analytical data collected.
Goals:
- Create an analogy to make the process playful;
- Convert personality tests into activities with game mechanics;
- Create reports that can be interpreted by people without extensive numerical expertise;
- Create an inference algorithm that is capable of pointing out potential courses for a given student profile.
To collect all the quantitative data that the inference algorithm needs, the student must go through a set of islands performing challenges, and games, answering questions, and making associations. This front-end is cross-platform and can be accessed through an app (Android/iOS) or a web browser.
Each island was designed to extract analytical data from the student, such as personality traits, talents, affinities, and hobbies. Each island relies on media to capture the student’s attention. The media are texts, photos/images, videos (animations and live actions), and games.
With the data collected, the platform’s algorithm establishes a ranking of 5 courses that have the most affinity with the student’s profile. This area generates reports with graphics to help the student in decision making. For each graph, there is an explanation of how the data should be interpreted.
