University of Colorado Boulder
CU Boulder's housing office needed to pair students as roommates. We built a drop-in set of custom Drupal modules around a multi-step matching questionnaire, integrated with the third-party APIs, authentication and housing databases the university already runs.
- A multi-step questionnaire that matches students with the roommates they are most likely to live well with
- Roommate agreements carried through the same system once students are paired
- Drop-in custom modules with their own install and update routines
- Integration with existing campus authentication and third-party APIs
- Scheduled syncs against the university's existing housing databases
- Multi-tiered, hierarchical admin reporting with extensive configuration options
About this project
The challenge
Pairing students as roommates is a harder problem than it first sounds, and the stakes are high, because a bad pairing is somebody's academic year. Doing it properly means asking students a great many questions about how they live, then working out which of them are compatible, which is a scoring and ranking problem rather than a form that files answers away. Around that sit the constraints of a large university: students sign in through systems the campus already runs, housing data lives in databases the university already maintains, and housing staff at different levels of the organization need to see different slices of what is happening. Whatever we built also had to drop into CU's existing Drupal site, with no separate site or login of its own.
What we built
The core of it is a multi-step questionnaire that is considerably more involved than it looks from the outside. It collects how a student lives across a long set of dimensions, then uses those answers to work out which other students they are most likely to live well with. Once students are paired, the same system carries them through a roommate agreement, so the match and the terms they settle on stay together in one place. We built the whole thing as a drop-in set of Drupal modules with their own install and update routines, integrated with CU's existing authentication so students have no new account to manage, and with scheduled syncs against the housing databases the university already keeps. Admin reporting is multi-tiered and hierarchical so staff see the scope their role covers, and extensive configuration options let housing staff change how it runs without coming back to us.
The result
A student moves from a questionnaire to a match to an agreed set of terms without ever leaving the systems the university already operates, and housing staff administer the process themselves through configuration, with no development work needed. The work has run across several separate engagements with CU's housing IT team rather than as a single project handed over and closed.
Built with
- Drupal
- Custom Drupal modules with install routines
- Multi-step roommate matching questionnaire
- Compatibility matching logic
- Roommate agreement workflow
- Integration with existing campus authentication
- Scheduled database syncs
- Multi-tiered hierarchical admin reporting
We've had several successful engagements with Rehab Creative and plan to continue using their services in future. Quick work, reasonably priced and solid quality.
Eric DenBraber
Assistant Director - Housing IT