2021 Wrap-Up | Cássia Nunes

Today’s 2021 WRAP-UP is from Cássia Nunes, Fourth Dimension Interaction Design student. Cássia is going into her fourth semester at CODE, having studied fashion design and consumer behaviour prior to moving into UX/UI, Cássia spent the last semester working on a project called Talkgirl.

What is Talkgirl?

Talkgirl is a learning platform/app formed by girls for girls. Learning and practice English conversations can be a challenge for most Brazilian girls and women for different reasons, such as financial, cultural, and geographic limitations. Most of the tech-based solutions available to practice online conversations available nowadays like (Tandem and Linguado) are not prepared to deal with an “inconvenience”: online dating fishing.

From learning platforms to bank apps, people can change the meaning and the objectives of an online service and end up using it as a dating app. In this scenario, practicing English conversation turned into an adventure for women. Trying to solve this problem, Talkgirl appears as a learning platform based on female volunteering (no-profit organization) focused on Brazilian young girls and women. Native English speakers from female sex/gender or women with advanced English skills can help other women to develop English conversation skills. We aim to be more than a connection platform, it will have learning journey guides and other features focused on the learning experience.

So, my idea was to create this female-friendly space based on volunteer work where we can help each other. The project still in a very very raw level and I’ve a lot to figure out (and I’m happy to receive feedback on that).

My biggest challenge this year/semester… 

Time management. This was the semester that I got a student work position and I had a lot to learn about that.

A person that really helped me this year with my project… 

Natalía Papadopoúlou (Senior Interaction Design Lecturer) has been an amazing sponsor and made me recover the motivation to keep going with that.