Emily Beinkampen ’17: Instead of the traditional pencil and paper method of taking attendance, a student-created app has put a new spin on this year’s homerooms. Adam Seibert ‘14, Jack Doyle ‘15, and Connor Delaney ‘17, worked together to organize and execute this student originated app. Seibert, who graduated last spring, was the main programmer, while Doyle was the marketing manager and Delaney took the title of manager of the group.
The group came together during the J-Term class App Challenge, where the idea came to them for a project. “For the class everyone had to design their own app and a lot of people were doing games, and we just figured it would have more use if it was practical,” Doyle explained. He continued, “We knew teachers had complained about the attendance system before, and we figured there would be an easy way to revolutionize it.”
Delaney commented, “We wanted to make an app that people would use in the Episcopal community and taking attendance on paper wastes a lot.” Doyle thought it was, “one of the needs at the school” and, “was definitely a bigger chore than we initially thought.”
“We all helped out with the programming a little but the actual creation was mostly from Seibert,” Doyle emphasized. “We used X code, which is an Apple computer science coding program.” Behind the program, the three students used a specific programming language known as objective C.
The creation of the app had a lot happening behind the scenes with technology too. Doyle described the process in detail saying, “We put a code in that shot a code through this web server and grabbed names which we parsed through so when the teacher hit the submit button, there would be a marker next to each name to pick if the student was present or absent. Finally, that gets sent back to the web and imported into the database.”
While the app was primarily student made, the three also had some help from Matt Memmo, Upper School Technology Coordinator, and Alex Pearson, also a Technology Coordinator. Doyle explained that, “We needed to work in conjunction with Mr. Pearson, as he controls all the database systems at EA.” Memmo aided the effort with the making of the app and managed bigger parts of the project, especially after the two week course came to an end. “It took us about three weeks and then over the course of the next month or so we would go periodically to work with Mr. Memmo because J-Term was over,” said Doyle.
Memmo added, “We got a bulk done in the J-Term time, but I had to do a lot of teaching to get them up to speed so by the time J-Term was over we still had a lot to do on the app.” He continued, “We spent about ten school blocks after J-Term putting it together.” Doyle revealed, “We were really engaged in the process up until we submitted it to Apple. Apple denied it the first time because there were some issues and Mr. Memmo really worked on the app after that.”
The students do wish they could make some small revisions to the app to improve the overall quality, and ultimately help homeroom teachers more. For example, Doyle mentioned, “If you submit it once you can’t resubmit it, so if there was a way to change that I would.” Memmo remarked, “It’s working pretty well but earlier in the fall there were a couple little quirks we needed to work out.” He specifically noted the freshman advisories because, “This year there are four teachers in some homerooms and the way we had it set up was just two teachers to a homeroom.” The team changed that dynamic of the program, as well as making an official web version of the app to make it more accessible so people with Androids can use it too.
According to Memmo, “Just about all of the faculty uses it.” Doyle agreed saying, “I know my homeroom teacher uses it, and my Form Dean told me she uses it so I assume it’s catching fire.”