Piazza: teaching the tech way

Why is doing homework with friends better? Piazaa explains it in many ways. First, when you are at sea then someone who is stable can be a lifesaver. Second, when professors or teachers ask, there any doubts, students remain silent. Piazza, the website, helps you to connect with studious friends and tech-savvy instructors. They can help you out in virtual classrooms where you can reach out to back benchers like the ever intelligent Ranchodas Chanchad (Aamir Khan) of the movie Three Idiots.

Have you ever faced a query that stumped all your classmates including the most brilliant student in your group? Even Google Baba fails to come up with a solution. If you have ever faced such a situation, then Piazza is the answer for you.

Piazza is essentially a ‘question-and-answer platform’ for students and teachers. Students can post their questions and their peers or teachers can answer.

Pooja Nath

Piazza has been developed by a Computer Science student of the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur (IIT-K), Pooja Nath who was annoyed as she struggled with the nuances of assignments and did not feel comfortable asking her male peers for help. She also felt that online tools, like Google and Wikipedia, were not specific enough to answer the questions that her assignments posed.

Keeping this in mind, Pooja developed a website called Piazza of which she is now the CEO. The website provides students who want to work alone an opportunity to ask questions. Piazza also allows teachers to understand the problems that students face and tailor the curriculum to their needs.

Pooja says, the platform is in the beta form and the Piazza team is making efforts to make it a helpful one.  

Students can sign up on the website and create a virtual classroom. It allows only users with an official e-mail id of schools or institutions.  The administrator of Piazza verifies the credentials of any new instructor or professor joining the virtual classroom. Students new to the website can understand the functioning of a virtual classroom through an online video on its home page.

The website is popular among tech-savvy students especially in the United States of America, the United Kingdom and other European countries. Many Indian students from different engineering colleges are also using the virtual classrooms for enhancing their knowledge of their subjects.

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