April 6, 2018 at 1:53 p.m.
TODAY'S TECHNOLOGY
St. Pius students create school app
St. Pius students create school app
And that's just what they're doing for their school.
St. Pius' app development club has taken on the task of creating an application for the school that will be featured in the Apple App Store.
"I was really interested when I heard about this," said Brandon Gallagher, the only sixth-grader in the club. Brandon is part of the group's engineering team, so he's one of the students who is actually writing the computer code to create the app.
"We use a program called XCode," he explained.
The app development club is getting coaching from Chris Bick, a St. Pius parent who runs the club along with assistant principal Danielle Cox. Mr. Bick is a software engineer who has previous experience building apps.
Student skills
The school approached him about potentially creating an app himself, but he had a different idea: "Why don't I have the kids do it? Why don't we take them through the whole process?
"They've really taken it and gone with it," remarked Ms. Cox.
The club, which numbers about 15 students, is divided into smaller groups to do the work.
"We have some who are more into the art end of things, and then those who are more into the technology end of things," Ms. Cox told The Evangelist.
"You don't have to be an engineer to develop software," Mr. Bick said.
Since April, he's been going to St. Pius twice a week to help the club develop the app. First, they surveyed parents, students, teachers and administrators to find out what features would helpful.
"We learned what the people did want and didn't want," said seventh-grader Rachel Pienkosz, who's on the design team. The survey wasn't a step she expected in the process: "You would think, in making the app, you would choose what you wanted to do."
But "that feedback really helped us," admitted Grace Leininger, a seventh-grader on the design team.
Grace said that creating the app was really confusing at first, but she "was really happy working with peers instead of teachers" and puzzle out problems with her classmates.
What it does
The students put the survey results on large story boards to narrow down the features they could realistically put into the app. Winning features included the school's calendar and contact information for all of St. Pius' teachers.
The app will also allow students to vote for the TCBY frozen yogurt flavor they'd like offered in their cafeteria each week.
"The hardest part was cutting down what we wanted to put in," said seventh-grader Tyler Cox. He said that compromising was a skill he learned through the project.
Tyler's app-development job was with the product management team. He helped to design the app; the engineers then built it. Tyler and his teammates are also in charge of advertising for the application: "We're planning on sending flyers home" with students.
When The Evangelist visited the app development club on a recent afternoon, the students were working on making the buttons on the app into circles instead of squares and creating the icon that users will see on their cell phones when they download it.
"They're working on inverting the colors now," said Rachel, explaining that the school's logo is usually a white background with blue detail, but the club wanted the app's icon to be blue, with the St. Pius X logo in white.
Easter egg
The club also decided what they wanted their "Easter egg" to be. An Easter egg is an inside joke that computer programmers hide in their applications. Google has become famous for hiding such features on its website; popular ones appear when users search "do a barrel roll" or "askew" into their Google search engine, for example.
The hidden Easter egg is kept secret by the development team, only to be found by people in the know or users who come across it accidentally.
The students said they learned a lot about teamwork during the club's meetings. Brandon noted that he would not have been able to do his job as an engineer if the design team hadn't come up with all of the concepts first. Members of the design team agreed.
Now that the students are experts on developing apps, they are asked more than ever for tech help from family members. "Especially my grandparents," said Grace. "They didn't grow up in the same era of technology."
The app will have a soft launch for students and faculty before the school year ends this month. It will then have a full launch, after getting accepted by the Apple App Store, in September.[[In-content Ad]]
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