Welcome to InterMatch! This digital tool connects schools in the Euregio with student teachers looking for short-term internships. By aligning standardized profiles from both sides, it enables objective and efficient internship placements across borders. Driven by a stable matching algorithm for transparent, fair and reliable internship matches, InterMatch considers the expectations of both schools and potential interns – for the perfect match in just a few clicks.
Matching markets are specialised platforms on which supply and demand for certain goods, services or opportunities are efficiently brought together, with the preferences of the participants playing a central role. In the context of matching students with school internships abroad, the aim is to find an optimal match between students who want to gain international experience and the schools that are willing to host these interns.
The use of fact sheets in which students and schools detail their preferences, skills, needs and offers forms the basis for effective matching and are agreed upon and developed ahead by all partners. A suitable mechanism for this context is provided by the Gale-Shapley algorithm, also known as the Stable Marriage Algorithm, which is designed to find stable matches between two groups based on their preferences without creating conflicts or unwanted assignments. In other words: After all students have been assigned their internship and all schools have received their interns, there is no pairing of a student and a school that would both rather work with each other than with their current match, thus effectively optimising and automating the internship allocation process.
The central questions in this process include how the preferences of students and schools can best be recorded, weighted and integrated into the matching algorithm. In addition, the question of fairness and transparency of the matching is of importance, particularly with regard to the equality of participants and the transparency of matching decisions. Another important aspect is the flexibility of the system in order to be able to deal with unequal pool sizes and to enable the highest possible number of matches. By developing a digital matching tool that is based on the preferences and information from the fact sheets of students and schools, the process of matching can be made more efficient, fairer and more accessible. While the aim of the tool is not to replace the human components of the matching process, such as meeting school representatives or discussing future interns’ skills and wishes, it should nonetheless free up time and manpower by filtering options based on objective criteria and suggesting the best matches for each potential internship. This not only promotes international mobility, but also helps to ensure that the benefits of the project can be used sustainably in other contexts.
Using human and technical resources from the RWTH Teacher Training Center’s MediaLab, the matching tool is set to be developed as a Bachelor’s thesis in computer sciences and programming over the course of six months starting in spring 2025, followed by a testing and implementation phase, ideally making the tool available to all project partners by the end of 2025 and gradually complementing the manual matching of students with host schools.
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