by Stephanie Palazzolo, assistant editor
Apps are used in everyday life, from the alarm that wakes someone up in the morning to the Instagram and Facebook apps people check before going to sleep at night. Most students can agree that they have tried out plenty of apps and utilize them on a day to day basis. However, how many people, let alone high schoolers, can say that they have created their own app? Meet junior Shreya Shankar, who has done exactly that.
“I’m creating an app and website, like a white-label product, that will offer a customizable school social media program called School Scoop so [clubs and teachers] can post events about what’s going on in the school,” Shankar said. “It’s basically a way for everyone to integrate themselves into the school and learn about what’s happening, like our motto, ‘Connecting Student Interests to Opportunity.’”
Shankar, along with four other students from other schools, came up with the idea through an organization based off the Harvard Innovation Lab.
“We basically just sat down and were like, ‘Wouldn’t it be nice if we didn’t have to deal with all these Facebook groups, emails, Edmodo groups and texting?’” Shankar said. “So we said, ‘Okay, why don’t we just create an app that will give people push notifications of events going on in their school?’”
The app, which consists of a home page, Sports tab, Clubs tab and Volunteer Activities tab, would connect to the school, allowing students to easily sign up into their school’s account and access important information about classes and clubs.
The app is currently being tested at Mounds View High School in Minnesota. With the feedback gained from the beta app, Shankar and her team plans to redesign parts of the app that student testers did not like.
“[Mounds View High School] is going to test out the whole mobile platform,” Shankar said. “We’ll see what they use, what they don’t use, what they like, what they don’t like. We look at what they need and keep on adding to that.”
In addition to testing out the app at a high school, Shankar and the other creators of the app conducted 100 interviews in order to get an idea of what exactly high school students wanted in a school-oriented app.
“If you’re going to design the product and release it without knowing what people want, then you’re kind of screwed if people don’t like it,” Shankar said. “So what you have to do is you have to ask potential users what they want, then make what they want, then show it to them and modify it if they don’t like it. The interviews are just helping us gauge what students need and what solutions to their problems we can offer.”
Many of the interviewed students expressed their interest in the developing app, including sophomore Steven Wang.
“The app would be an useful addition to the school’s online academic utility,” Wang said. “I would easily be able to be notified of events, such as the study sessions that the statistics teachers host to prepare students for upcoming test, and I would be able to prepare accordingly rather than forgetting per usual.”
The creation of the app consisted of a lot of trial and error and was especially difficult for Shankar, who was one of two tech specialists on her team.
“At one point I had to learn about five computer languages in about a month,” Shankar said. “In November, I sat down and learned HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Ruby and Ruby on Rails.”
Despite all the obstacles and hard work, though, Shankar believes that the whole experience has given her valuable insight, and she remains optimistic about the outcome of the app.
“Just seeing that we can talk to people, see what they need and create a product is definitely the best part,” Shankar said. “I’m really excited because we’re going to test this out next week and I can’t wait to see where it goes from there. I don’t have high expectations; I just keep trying, keep failing and keep going.”
Want to learn more? Check out the School Scoop app’s website here.
