The programming class at Gering has developed an app for Gering Public Schools. It is the existing website put all on an app.
Seniors Danielle Schick and Felipe VanWinkle have been the main programmers on this project.
“We started working on this project a month after school started and have been working on it ever since,” Schick said.
The app’s purpose is to provide a better form of communication with parents, students, administration, and teachers. It has easy access of lunch menus, activities calendars, infinite campus, and each of the school’s contact information.
The class thought of the idea at the beginning of the school year.
“We were brainstorming ideas for the possibilities of apps and what we could create. We just landed on a Gering Schools app,” VanWinkle said.
The app is now found on the Google Play Store for all Google and Samsung users. The team is now working on getting users to download the app and see how they like it compared to the website.
Senior Emilyann Kaup is also a lead programmer working on the app. She is working on the Apple side of the project and trying to produce the app on the Apple App Store.
“We are hoping to get the app on the Apple App Store by the end of the semester,” Kaup said.
The project has allowed the students to learn different forms of programming, the team has faced a variety of different challenges and have created several solutions to solve them.
“The collaboration between us as a group was one of the biggest struggles,” Schick said. “We were working on different computers and it was very difficult getting on things on my computer then figuring out how to get it on Felipe’s computer.”
Both Schick and VanWinkle worked their best efforts on this app and faced numerous problems including integrating the phone app into the project, adding different tools into the code, making the layout of the app, and publishing the app on the Google Play store.
“Sometimes ,it took a class period to figure out how to solve some issues. Once in a while, it took a couple of minutes. Sometimes, it took weeks,” Schick and VanWinkle said. “It all just depended on how big the problem was.”
When putting the app on the app store, Schick and VanWinkle did not have an original domain name, which was required to publish the app. They had to then go back into the base code and change that name.
“It was very difficult naming the domain name, not necessarily the name for it, but the programming behind it,” Schick said. “We did not want to mess up what we already had in the app and what it consisted of.”
In the future, the programming class is hoping to make the app more modern and user-friendly. They want to make the app easier for parents, who do not know much about technology.
“I am hoping the app will be maintained and well taken care of when we are graduated,” Schick said.
In the future, Kaup is hoping everyone will have the opportunity to download the app, including Apple users.