Students build the school's own apps
The small software your branches need, built as coursework and used for real.
Who this suits. A group that keeps deciding a piece of software would be useful and keeps deciding it is not worth buying.
- Could start
- The term after the first one, once a teacher knows what students can finish
- What it asks of the school
- Moderate
How it runs
The school writes down the small things it wishes it had: sports day entries, library requests, lost property, the parent enquiry form, canteen pre-orders, the transport route list, a form the office currently keeps in a register.
Students build them as their coursework, with a teacher deciding what is good enough to actually use. The ones that pass go into service in that branch.
With twenty branches this is where it compounds. An app built by one class in one branch is used by all of them, and the next class improves it instead of starting again.
What each side puts in
The school provides
- A list of the small software the school actually wants
- A teacher to judge what is good enough to put into service
- The willingness to let students' work be used in the building
The school gets
- Software the school genuinely needed, at the cost of a lesson
- One app built once and used in every branch
- Students who can see the point, because the users are down the corridor
The students get
- A real user with a real complaint, which no set exercise can imitate
- Something in daily use in their own school with their name on it
- A reason to care that survives the end of the lesson
How it is paid for
Partly out of what the school would otherwise spend on small software, and partly out of the lab budget. For most groups this is the model where the programme stops looking like a cost.
There is no price on this page, and that is on purpose. What this costs to run depends on how it is taught — short exercises shared between a few students cost a fraction of what long solo projects cost — and we would rather measure that in your school than quote a number we cannot stand behind. Whatever follows a pilot is agreed in writing before the pilot begins.
The catch
Real users have real expectations. Pick things that can fail on a Tuesday without anybody being harmed — sports day entries, not fee collection; lost property, not attendance records. And a student app that the office comes to depend on needs somebody to own it after that student leaves. Decide who, before it goes into service.
Every model on the main page carries one of these, and the same page lists what we have not built yet. Everything we have not finished across the whole product is on our trust page.
Start with one class, one term, free.
Whichever model you end up running, the first step is the same: one branch, one teacher, one term, at no cost.
Talk to us about a pilot