As a parent, my daily routine is to check at least two folders of my daughter's backpack, my email box from multiple school related senders, and watch out every morning of my text messages. Still, I miss some events from time to time, so I started chatting with other moms on a regular basis in order to catch everything from school. That becomes a problem for me since my daughter started kindergarten, which is a communication problem that the messages are all scattered around and hard to organize. Currently, there is no existing product that has satisfactory performance or good market share.
Our app will provide a one-stop shop for all school related information (or activities as next step). It functions as a message board organized according to schools, classrooms, or teachers for all public information; it allows private talk between each parent and their kid's teacher; it also provides calendar and meeting scheduler functionality. The contents can be homework, event announcement, or meeting invites, etc.
It brings great convenience to both teachers and parents. Teachers can edit/publish at their fingertips in almost real time if they choose. Every minute we saved of teachers in communication is one more minute we earned for them to focus on students' development. Equally importantly, parents can get all message faster and at their convenient times, i.e., during a 10 mins break at their work or after lunch. That is expected to bring better participations from especially busy parents in their kids' education.
Our app shall also integrate with current social channels, like email, Facebook, twitter, and SMS text message. That way, our app maintains to be one-stop shop and the same time leverages all the advantages current social networks/methodologies can offer. This also has a practical impact, that will allow our app to be compatible and thus easier to integrate with current system in use.
In the future steps, our app shall open parent-to-parent channels, student-to-student channels, multimedia channels, to bring more fun and involvement of all parties.
The goal of our app is to bring a "transparent" communication channel for eduacation. By "transparent", we mean great user convenience, that the users, be parents or publishing teachers, don't even notice the step of information inquiry and can directly focus on content itself. Thus, our app aims to promote education quality by solving its communication problem.
Our app shall follow state-of-the-art communication standards only popular in very recent years. It should be quite different with current scattered practices, which often causes communication loss or confusion.
Our app shall also deploy most advanced industry design principle emphasizing on usability and simplicity.
Of course, our app shall bring highest engineering standard as of performance, reliability and scalability. We will use swift in iOS development and python in backend server development.
Our team has two partners, myself is an IT software engineer and Leah, my partner, is product/graphic designer. We both share ensuthiasm in education and communication; we would like to see the communication is pushed to its best level possible in education, which is the goal of our app.
I have extensive leading and hands-on experience in mobile and server development. I worked at Visa Inc. for 5+ years as a lead developer to help build one of the best used apps, Visa Check iOS SDK, which has 6+ million users as of last year. I will bring the best industry engineering standard into our app.
//Leah, add something you want to say here.
In financially underdeveloped neighborhoods, parents are usually both busy working and less time to fully devote to their kids' education. Our app will bring them better access to all school information at their convenient times, maybe during a 10 mins break at work, and thus bring better involvement of them in their kids' education.
The money will be used to rent servers, pay about 30% of development needs. Leah shall cover all product and graphic design work of our app, and I shall cover all architecture work, project management work, mobile development work. We will need to hire a back-end development to help build server side logic that should account about 30% of total engineering load.
