TutorLink

find lasting mentorships in less than a second

Non-profit tutoring organizations must deal with the hassle of assigning students to tutors based on availability, grades, mutual interests, and more. TutorLink provides organizations with an easy-to-use, free algorithm to seamlessly match students with tutors, creating convenient one on one lessons or collaborative groups, and fostering tutor-student relationships through shared goals.

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Overview

Information on this page is provided by the innovator and has not been evaluated by HundrED.

Web presence

2023

Established

20

Children

1

Countries

Target group

Students lower

Updated

May 2023

We hope to encourage high school students like us who are interested in making a change in their communities by supporting other students through fun and helpful tutoring sessions. TutorLink allows for such student-led tutoring organizations to operate more effectively, maximizing each tutor's capability to instruct and support, and addressing each student's needs.

About the innovation

Why did you create this innovation?

Working with many nonprofits to tutor children from underserved communities, our team of tutors struggled with immediately creating new student-tutor pairings when a new student joined or schedules were shifted. We also struggled to maximize the capabilities of each tutor by pairing them with students that needed various types of help, such as teaching lessons or assisting with homework.

What does your innovation look like in practice?

TutorLink is a system including online forms and a python-based algorithm that automatically pairs tutors to students based on various factors, including schedules, grade levels for tutoring groups, and both tutor and student preferences. By matching preferences, such as certain units (ex. decimals) or needs (homework assistance), volunteer tutoring organizations are able to more effectively support their students. It only requires tutors and students to fill out a simple survey and conducts the match.

Within our own student-led tutoring organization, the Red Shield Tutors (we work closely with the Salvation Army), TutorLink has been able to create successful matches. Our innovation is relatively new, created this year, and we hope to share its benefits to other volunteer tutoring organizations.

How has it been spreading?

Within our own organization, TutorLink has maximized our ability to support our students. Red Shield Tutors was formed in response to Covid-19, to support students from districts that lacked access to critical resources over the pandemic. However, as many of the nonprofits we partnered with were overwhelmed, it restricted our ability to reach as many students as possible. TutorLink has made matching easier, enhancing our ability to effectively and efficiently run sessions and deal with last-minute issues.
While we have not expanded its use outside our own organization, we hope to expand it to the various tutoring organizations at our high school, and eventually other high schools in California. Furthermore, we also hope to expand it to student-led organizations beyond California.

If I want to try it, what should I do?

It is easy for any tutoring organization to apply TutorLink! To get started, the interested organization can reach out to redshieldtutoringmchs@gmail.com for a brief introduction to the system, how to use it, and other recommendations.

Implementation steps

Copy the Program Code

Copy project code. Upload project code to a Web-Based Python Compiler such as pythonanywhere.com

Create a Google Form

Copy the standard Google Forms that request data for either tutors or students. You should identify which values you would like to group tutors and students by and modify existing questions to fit such needs. As the algorithm has been carefully crafted according to the form, be sure to modify the question and answer choices, but not the question type itself (don't modify a Multiple Choice Question to select all or short answer, etc.)

Create a Service Account

Connect a Google service account (built into your google account through your API dashboard) to allow the program access to your Google Form.

Gather Data

Send the Google form link to your tutors and students to get the data.

Customize

Feel free to customize the date that the program runs (through the Pythonanywhere dashboard). If a tutor or student is no longer in service, then you can remove their row from the Google Sheet and their name from the matches page of the Google Sheet. Have fun!