Doorward joins forces with Parkway Spark!

This fall, Doorward was thrilled to participate in an exciting initiative led by Leidos designed to partner students seeking real-world experience with innovative technology companies. Working with the Parkway School District, Nicole Mathern, Community Partnerships Manager for Leidos wanted to design an experience that would give students exposure to a technology landscape that is constantly changing at an ever faster pace.

Stephen Aydt, Doorward’s Chief Technology Officer, was intrigued by the opportunity and thought “Let’s throw them a project and see what they come up with.”

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Understanding Social Real Estate

While Doorward is focused on launching “Social Media for Real Estate” at this stage, the company is also clear on where this is all leading. On a Social Real Estate platform where individuals can finally leverage their most powerful asset (aka their network!) to source the right qualified professional from someone they already trust, being able to streamline actual collaboration with those new connections is going to become very important.

For example, take the skilled trades who are critical partners of real estate investors. For many renovations, a dozen or more trades need to work together to complete the project. Thus Steve envisioned a collaborative calendar by which the various parties could coordinate the many moving parts.

Teamwork is everything

“It’s incredible that - with as little time as they had - they had the ability to continually improve every week, learn something and implement it,“ Steve marveled, “I wasn’t expecting them to cover that much ground!”

The students’ ability to work together to accomplish the goal amazed even themselves. “I am also grateful for the team because we were able to get more done than we ever thought possible,” said Ian Heathcote, a senior at Parkway West.

Drew McAllister, Program Director of Spark! Technology Solutions attributes it to the fast paced nature of the project. “When I think about the Doorward project, these students will not know what they got until they get out of college…they are going to look back at this experience and realize that was exactly what work is like and think “I made it through that and I’m going to make it through this. This project threw them into the deep end and by the end they were swimming.“

Many challenges leading to a great experience

The students were able to learn the basics of a number of programming languages. The capacity to be comfortable taking on new challenges is huge, but as Yusuf Khan, another senior, said, “But the biggest thing that I will be taking away from this is how important a good team is.” The team also expressed gratitude to Steve, the Doorward CTO, for his patient coaching and relentlessly pushing them to new heights.

For Doorward, the experience was another win-win. With the students excited about unexpected horizons and a plethora of hot ideas for Doorward’s Social Real Estate roadmap, everyone agreed it was a huge success.