BooDoo
For schools

A computer period that ends with working software

Your students describe an app in plain words and get a real one — live at its own web address and running on their phone. Below are the ways a school can run that, and how each one is paid for. The first one is free for a term.

The problem is not that students dislike the lab

Most school computer periods teach real things on paper, because the gap between what a class of thirty can be taught in forty minutes and what it takes to build software has always been enormous. Students finish with a diagram of an app and a mark out of ten. Nobody uses what they made, so nobody remembers making it.

That gap closed recently, and it closed suddenly. A student who can say clearly what they want can now have it built and put on the internet inside one period. The skill that matters is no longer typing the syntax — it is knowing what to ask for, noticing what came back wrong, and saying what to change. That is teachable to a class of thirty, in the period you already timetable, by a teacher who has never programmed.

What a student actually does in one period

  1. A student describes the app they want

    In plain English or Hindi, the way they would explain it to a friend. No code, no diagram, no setup on the lab machines — a browser is the whole requirement.

  2. It gets built while they watch

    An AI writes the app. The student sees the screens appear and can say what is wrong with them, which is the part that teaches: describing something precisely is hard, and they find that out immediately rather than in a viva.

  3. It goes live at its own web address

    Not a preview on the lab machine. A real address anyone can open, plus the same app running as an Android app on their own phone.

  4. Somebody uses it and complains

    The friend, the class, the school office. The student changes it and watches what happens. That loop, run three times in a term, is most of what a working engineer actually does.

What the school gets out of it

An activity, not a subject

It sits inside the Computer Science or Artificial Intelligence elective you already run. It is not another thing to timetable, and it needs no new lab equipment — everything happens in a browser.

A teacher who does not need to code

The teacher runs the room, sets the brief and decides what is good enough. We give them the exercises and the answers to the questions students actually ask. We do not ask them to learn to program over a holiday.

Something to show parents

Every finished app is a link that opens on any phone in the room. Open day, the board meeting, the admissions conversation — it is the rare school activity where the evidence is a working thing rather than a photograph of children at desks.

Software the school itself can use

Sports day entries, library requests, lost property, the parent enquiry form. Small things every branch wants and none is worth buying. Built by a class, used by the office. With twenty branches, built once and used in all of them.

The ways this can work

Ten of them, grouped by the decision they belong to: where it sits in the school week, who pays for it, and what changes when it is a group of branches rather than one school. Most schools end up running two or three of these at once.

Start here

One class, one branch, one term. Everything further down this page is easier to judge once a teacher of yours has done this.

The pilot term

One class, one branch, one term, free.

Can start
This term
What it asks of you
Light

Ways to run it in the school week

Where it sits — a timetabled period, an afternoon club, or the senior project. Pick one; they can run side by side later.

The lab hour

The computer period you already timetable, with something in it worth doing.

Can start
Next term, once one of your teachers has run the pilot
What it asks of you
Moderate

The after-school club

Twenty or thirty volunteers, one afternoon a week, and no timetable to change.

Can start
This term
What it asks of you
Light

The class 11 and 12 project

One real app each, live at its own address, for the board project and the college file.

Can start
At the start of an academic year
What it asks of you
Committed

Ways it pays for itself

Three ways the money can work that do not start with a new line in the lab budget.

Students build the school's own apps

The small software your branches need, built as coursework and used for real.

Can start
The term after the first one, once a teacher knows what students can finish
What it asks of you
Moderate

The student studio

Senior students build for local businesses, supervised. What it earns goes back into the lab.

Can start
A full year in, and only in a branch where the senior programme is already working
What it asks of you
Committed

Families pay for their own

The school gives the period and the teacher. Parents buy the building plan.

Can start
Whenever you like
What it asks of you
Light

Ways to run it across every branch

What changes when it is not one school but twenty. Each of these assumes one branch has already run it.

Run it under your own name

One agreement for the whole group, one shared budget, every branch visible.

Can start
The academic year after a successful pilot
What it asks of you
Committed

The inter-branch app fair

Every branch sends its best apps to one event a year.

Can start
One year in, once enough branches have something to send
What it asks of you
Moderate

Why we want to start with one branch

If your group has fifteen or twenty branches, the useful version of this conversation is the one about all of them. We would still like to begin with one class, in one branch, for one term, at no cost — and it is worth being straight about why, because it is not modesty.

We have not run this in a school yet. The models on this page are built on what we know about the product and what schools have told us they want. They are not built on a term of watching a real teacher run a real room, and the gap between those two is where every education product goes wrong. One term in one branch closes it.

The other reason is arithmetic. What this costs to run depends heavily on how it is taught — short exercises in small groups cost a fraction of what long solo projects cost. We would rather measure that in your school, on your students, than quote you a number from a spreadsheet and discover we were wrong at renewal. So there is no price list on this page, deliberately. The price for what follows the pilot is agreed in writing before the pilot starts.

After that term, the branch-wide models on this page stop being proposals. Your teacher trains the next group of teachers, and the programme spreads through your own people rather than through ours.

What we have not built yet

Everything below is true today. We would rather you heard it in the first meeting than found it in the fourth.

No limit on what one student can spend

A class shares one pool of building budget, and nothing stops one determined child using more of it than everyone else. For one school we watch the pool and warn you early. For twenty we would need to build the limit properly first.

No teacher’s view, and no marks

There is no screen showing a teacher what every student in the class is doing, and nothing that awards a grade. Assessment stays with the teacher, on the school’s own terms, looking at the apps themselves.

Rosters are managed by hand

Adding a class of students, or seeing which branches are using the programme, is something we would do for you rather than something you would do on a screen. Fine for a pilot. Not fine at twenty branches, and we would build it before we got there.

Android and the web, not iPhone

A finished app is live on the web and installable as an Android app. There is no iPhone version of a student’s app. Anyone with an iPhone opens it in the browser, which works, but it is not the same thing and we will not pretend it is.

Safeguarding is a conversation, not a checkbox

Accounts for minors, what a teacher can see, and what a published student app shows the world are things we want to settle with your team before a single student signs in — not afterwards.

Not every idea finishes

Some apps do not come out right, and a student sometimes ends a period with something broken. We never charge for fixing our own mistakes, but we are not going to claim every child leaves every lesson with a working app.

Start with one class, one term, free.

One branch, one teacher, one period a week. We set it up, we cover the term, and at the end your teacher tells you whether it was worth it.

Talk to us about a pilot

Or read how BooDoo works first, and try it yourself before you put it in front of a class.