Exciting day in the office! We are going to visit two very cool companies today: Kahoot! and Differ. In the morning we go by the big quiz company Kahoot.
We had to gather at 09:10 to arrive at Kahoot! around 09:30. Since our appointment with them was at 10:00 we could let out our childish minds by enjoying the kinder garden in front of the Kahoot office. Others got to explore the harbor of Oslo before the meeting with Kahoot could start.
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At Kahoot! we started off with a general introduction to Kahoot. Here we especially learned about how they are organized and which applications they make. We learned that they have two main applications and thus also two main teams: Core Team and App Team. The core team works on the web application and thus is very much focused on a stable application. The App Team has more creative freedom since they have fewer users. Due to this setup Kahoot has the perfect set up to develop new things on the one hand but on the other hand a very efficient main platform.
After the general introduction, they showed us a lot about the App Team that currently focuses on Kahoot Kids. We learned about the difficult design aspects that have to do with designing for children. After these talks, we had some interaction with the interns of Kahoot. They showed us their projects and were very keen to receive some feedback from us about what they made. We were able to give them some useful feedback which made a fun session for them but also for us! We ended up with a fun session where we play-tested some features that are still in beta, so we can’t say anything about that yet…
After our visit to Kahoot we had about one hour to lunch before we had to go to our second company visit of the day: Differ. Differ is a company that makes a communication platform for students to get to know each other better. They especially focus on new students that do not have any friends yet. They have done research and it turns out that it is very difficult for students to find people with similar interests. Differ jumps in this gap to connect these people through their platform. We got some interesting insights into how Differ works and had some nice talks about the differences between the culture in the Netherlands and other student cultures.
We also learned about how Differ is organized. Although Differ does not have that many employees (around 7) they are located all around Europe. However, by using platforms such as Slack efficiently they still manage to communicate with each other. The session ended with a round of questions of which two are written out below.
Q: “At our university, the communities and social groups are not gathered through a platform like Differ but sort of manage themselves, is this so much different here in Scandinavia?”
A: “Well there is one big organization that manages, for example, sports associations that are typically Norwegian for example hiking. But if you are not really into those kinds of things there are not many other options. I think it is really unique that you have so many of those things at your university.”
Q: “Don’t you think that social through an online platform is less effective than meeting people in real life?”
A: “Obviously it is a different experience to meet people in real life compared to meeting people online. Differ focuses on the first contact between people and encourages friend groups to meet in real life. Especially this first type of contact can be very difficult for people. Our tests have shown that meeting each other online can really improve the student participation and the percentage of people that complete courses.”
After the meeting everyone got to enjoy some free time. This evening we will have a fun night at the roof terrace of our hostel with some drinks. Hopefully, we can wake up all healthy tomorrow and enjoy our boat tour. See you tomorrow!