School Chauffeur

In the unprecedented times we now live in, schooling has also taken a turn towards the unexpected with many schools across the nation moving onto online learning. However, with the rise of unexpected learning has come the rise of unexpected problems. For us at Hunter High School, one of our most prevalent problems as members of the student body has been the absence of the school bell. Although it's normally seen as a mundane and sometimes somewhat useless, the lack of a bell has not only prompted extensions of class times with some classes bleeding into others, but also difficulty focusing on classes and attending the various links on zoom. Studies have shown that the ringing of the bell provides an important sense of closure for one class that allows for students to shift their attention between classes with no crossover due to the distinct division. After polling other students throughout the nyc area, we saw that this was a widespread issue and decided to create a chrome extension that would address this issue by helping shuttle students between classes with a notification and chime.

However, during our development of the google chrome extension, we ran into a number of different problems from basically not knowing javascript to having compatibility issues between google and some of our functions. However, after a couple of days of studying and a lot of reliance on stack overflow, we were able to find alternatives to the functions we needed by melding together different functions to produce the needed effect. As a result, we now have a much better understanding of melding of functions as well as knowledge of java script.

Our eventual hope is to roll this out to all schools in order to better the online learning that will become the norm for students over the next few months. We hope to soon add functionalities such as the ability to take notes as well as a more user-friendly UI that will lead to a suite of functionality like direct links to google docs and folders so that the student has everything in one place.