Deepa's Instrument Check

A short walk-through a teacher does before class, so every guitar, keyboard and tabla is tuned and playable when the first student sits down.

Who this is for

Deepa Iyer teaches guitar and keyboard in Madurai, in two rooms above a photocopy shop. Forty-one students, three part-time teachers, fourteen guitars, six keyboards and two tabla sets. The moment this lands in is ten to seven on a Saturday morning, hot room, sun coming in hard through the window, ten minutes before eleven children climb the stairs.

How the job is done today

Deepa checks by ear when she remembers, which is most mornings and not all. The rest lives in a WhatsApp group with her three teachers, where a message at eleven at night reads guitar 3 e string gone. There is a blue register at the desk that stopped being filled in March. Mostly a fault is found by an eight-year-old who cannot get a sound out of the thing. Then a teacher goes to borrow from the other room, the class that was using it stops, and both classes start eight minutes late.

The screens, in order

1. Your instruments — Lets the school owner enter each instrument once with a tag number and the room it lives in, so a teacher never has to type a name again.
2. Start a check — Asks which room and which class slot, then hands over the instruments in that room in a fixed order so nothing is skipped.
3. One instrument — Shows a single instrument in large type with three buttons big enough that a teacher can judge it and move on in about four seconds.
4. What is wrong — Opens only when something is not right, and takes one short line about the fault in the teacher's own words.
5. Room ready — Says plainly whether the class can start now, and names anything still to be sorted before it does.
6. Needs fixing — Gives the owner one running list of instruments that are not playable, oldest first, so nothing sits for three weeks.

What it keeps track of

• Instruments — tag number, what it is, which room it lives in, when it was last checked, whether it is playable right now
• Checks — which room, which day and slot, which teacher did it, how many were fine, whether the room was cleared to start
• Faults — which instrument, what the teacher wrote, who reported it, still open or sorted, the day it was sorted
• Schools — school name, its rooms, its teachers and their logins, paid up to which date

The one decision that matters

The check could be one long page listing every instrument with a tick box beside each, which is fewer taps and feels quicker. Or it can be one instrument per screen, with buttons big enough to cover half the phone. Go with one per screen. On a five-year-old phone in a room with hard morning light, a column of small tick boxes gets tapped wrongly, and once a teacher stops trusting the record the whole thing is decoration. One instrument filling the screen, black on white, large type, can be judged and cleared in about four seconds. Twenty-two instruments then take under two minutes, and a wrong tap is obvious the second it happens.

What to leave out of the first version

Leave out photos of the damage, repair shop contacts and any money spent. A teacher with eleven children on the stairs will not take a clear photo of a warped neck, and the photo says nothing that the line neck bent, third fret buzzing does not already say. Leave out reminders too. If the check takes two minutes and stands between the teacher and starting class, it gets done without being nagged.

How you would know it worked

Three Saturdays running, no class starts late because of an instrument, and nobody types who took the tabla into the group. At the second school Deepa sells it to, the check is finished before the first student has taken off their shoes.

Build it

Paste this in and let it run.

I run a small music school in Madurai with fourteen guitars, six keyboards and two tabla sets across two rooms, and I want a website my teachers open on their phone before each class. Show them one instrument at a time in big black text on white, because our phones are old and the morning sun in that room makes anything else impossible to read. For each one they tap fine, needs tuning, or not playable, and only when something is wrong do they type one short line about it. At the end tell them whether the room is ready or what is still pending. Give me a separate page listing everything not playable, oldest first. I want to sell this to two other schools in town, so each school needs its own instrument list, its own teachers with logins, and a monthly payment.