School Minder

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App with an Event
School Minder team during their presentation

Inspiration

Students have been using physical planners less and less. They are relying on their phones more or not writing things down at all. When a teacher announces homework it is usually at the end of class when the bell is ringing or about to ring. So we wanted to implement a quick way of logging those reminders to your phone, which would be much simpler then the default app on your phone.

Our Solution

Efficiency is what our app creates for students. When the bell rings they can quickly pull out their phone and put in a reminder for the homework. It takes only three simple steps, the name of the event, date, and time. Then it's logged down.

Challenges we ran into

We ran into many challenges along the way. We first had an issue displaying multiple events in the list view. We spent two weekends researching online on how to fix our issue or find an alternate way. Finally, we watched a recording from a NAF Lenovo webinar for a text messaging app and took components from that to fix our issue. Another issue was with the limitations of the MIT App Inventor itself. We wanted to incorporate notifications that would automatically be set when you create an event, we researched thoroughly but we were not able to find a definitive way. We finally had an online meeting with Krishnendu Roy who is an MIT App Inventor expert. He told us that the ideal notifications we seek are not possible due to the limitations of the app builder. So he advised us to use an alternative method which is the Today's Events button we created. This button brings up all of the events for the present day as a way to get events since notifications don't work.

Next Steps

There is a lot of potential for our app with our future goals. One thing we would like to implement is a connection to our school's learning management system, Schoology. So, when teachers add an assignment to Schoology, it will automatically be put onto our app. Another thing we would like to do is link Google Calendar so anyone can link up their calendar so all the events are centralized. Both Schoology and Google Calendar have very open API's which could be added to our apps. In addition, we would like to take the suggestions from the judges of our local competition and incorporate them into our app. Some suggestions include an undo button option for the clear button and becoming more versatile with adults.

Lessons Learned

The thing we learned the most was self-taught learning. We had to research for countless hours on Google teaching ourselves how to code our app by watching other people's tutorials and adjusting their code to help our scenario. Self-learning is an important skill in which we have obtained through this app. Along with self-taught learning, we learned that dedication is required to create a successful app. We all have spent long nights working to piece together an app that fulfills our satisfaction within the time we were given. Without dedication, our app wouldn’t have been where it is today. Lastly, we learned that perseverance is key when designing the app. There have been many times where we were faced with challenges but we were able to overcome them by working hard on finding solutions to these difficulties.