Communications of the ACM
When CS Students Need Help Asap, They Can Now Turn to Piazzza
Piazzza cofounder and CEO Pooja Nath
Courtesy of Pooja Nath
It may not seem like an earth-shattering problem unless you’re a college student with an important test or paper due the next day and all you can rely on for help is a hodgepodge of forums, newsgroups, emails, and instant messages.
Pooja Nath was once in that predicament. As a computer science undergrad student at IIT Kanpur, she knew all too well how difficult it was to quickly get advice from professors, teaching assistants (TAs), and other students, so she set out to remedy the situation.
Nath’s solution is Piazzza, a next-generation, wiki-style Q&A platform that she and a six-person team created two years ago, and has been adopted by more than half of the undergrads at Stanford University and is growing virally at University of California, Berkeley, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Harvard, Princeton, and 70 other campuses.
“Our Web site saves professors and TAs a ton of time and really helps students get the help they need,” says Nath, a CS graduate from the University of Maryland who has worked as a software developer at Oracle, Kosmix, and Facebook. “Best of all, it’s free.”
Piazzza organizes and facilitates the back-and-forth postings that result when a student requests information online. By using a wiki format, professors, TAs, and students can edit the communal responses to allow the most accurate information to rise to the top. The Web site is all about modeling face-to-face discussions and then reproducing them in a virtual space.
From a teaching perspective, Dan Garcia, who’s a computer science lecturer at the University of California, Berkeley, says he’s been using Piazzza since January in his 13 courses. It has become “the single source of truth about all our course-related information,” says Garcia. “I’ve never seen a tool that so directly hits the nail on the head in terms of every information-flow problem I’ve been struggling with for the 19 years I’ve been teaching. I literally sat there during the demo with my mouth open.”
As founder and CEO of Piazzza, Nath says she has no interest in monetizing her Web site, and vows never to charge students or teachers for its use. But, off campus, she has reportedly received a lot of attention from venture capitalists who see applications for Piazzza in business where facilitating communications is also important.
Nath’s business model as “just about perfect in that she does very agile development with a small team that’s completely user-centric,” says Garcia. “She recognized a problem that she experienced herself. She created a solution that she started as a student project, built a small prototype, launched it where people would try it and bear with the problems everyone has with early alphas, gained some momentum, took feedback, and quickly incorporated that feedback into the software. There’s no massive version 1.0 rollout and then a long wait until version 2.0. Development is ongoing, which is the beauty of the Web and cloud computing. It’s a real lesson to be learned by anyone with similar ideas about software development success.”
Paul Hyman was editor-in-chief of several technology publications at CMP Media, including Electronic Buyers’ News.
No entries found