When Students Sell What They Build

This post is for lecturers tired of grading prototypes nobody uses, and students who want their code to matter beyond the classroom.

The Problem With Prototypes

Every semester, students build prototypes. They present them. They get graded. Then the prototypes die. Nobody uses them. Nobody pays for them. The code sits in a repository collecting dust.

I wanted to change that. What if the grade depended not just on building something, but on someone actually wanting to pay for it?

Income-based Education

I proposed something called Income-based Education (IBE). The idea is simple: students still build prototypes as their assignment. But to get the highest grade, they must find a real client willing to pay for the product. Not millions. Just IDR 500,000 (about US$ 32). Enough to prove that someone values what they built.

This changes the conversation. Students stop asking "what does the lecturer want?" and start asking "what does the user need?" That shift is everything.

The Tools

But first-year students cannot just code from scratch. They need frameworks that reduce the barrier. We gave them two things:

First, User-centered Design Canvas (UCDC), a visual framework (inspired by Business Model Canvas) that forces students to think about users before writing code. Who is the user? What do they need? What is the value proposition?

Second, a Low-Code Framework (Frappe) that generates CRUD forms and database tables automatically. Students define what data they need, the system generates the web pages. This lets them focus on the product, not the plumbing.

We built a supportive tool that integrates both: students design UX with UCDC, then generate working prototypes with low-code. Lecturers track progress through activity logs.

What Happened

58 students participated. Average time from raw idea to finished prototype: 12 days. Two groups actually got paid by real clients. More than 71% said the method helped them practice solving real-world problems. Over 60% said the tools were easy to use and they would use them again.

Whether they got paid or not, students reported the same benefits: having a portfolio, learning collaboration, and experiencing project management. The money was not the point. The mindset shift was.

Read the Full Paper

The details (architecture, experiment phases, Likert results, everything) are in the paper. I have made it available as a preprint:

Read the full paper: User-centered Approach and Low-Code Framework for Prototyping and Income-based Education →

Published at IEEE CONMEDIA 2023, Bali. If you are a lecturer looking for ways to make student projects matter beyond the classroom, this might give you ideas.