Every day in the halls of Jesuit, a student runs down the hall toward his classroom, English assignment in hand, rushing to beat the bell. Another student plows through his math homework before algebra class, finishing with one minute to spare. Understandably, these students simply forgot that they had homework assigned the previous day; they failed to write a reminder down in their planner, which happens to the best of us. What if there was a more efficient way to keep track of your work than a bulky day planner? That’s what Michael Lanham ’15 was thinking when he and a friend created the Android app Homework Pro.
“So basically the app takes a number of different characteristics of your homework—the grade you have in the class, the type of assignment it is, the difficulty of the assignment, and when the assignment is due—and then it prioritizes it for you,” Lanham said. The app brings together all your assignments for the week on one user-friendly interface. “It tells you when you should do one assignment, what you should do first. It organizes your work in a way that you don’t have to worry about being late with something, and you know what to work on and how to be most efficient with your time,” he explained in further detail.
The app has been a long time coming. Lanham has had the idea since the beginning of freshman year. “When I first took Intro to Computer Programming, I had the idea to make a homework organizer, so I tried it the summer after freshman year when I’d taken the spring semester course, but I was incapable of doing it. I just didn’t have the technical knowledge to create the app or the program,” he admitted. However, he didn’t let that stop the idea from becoming a reality.
As Lanham progressed through high school, he gained more technical expertise. Lanham highlighted how one of his friends brought the subject back up. “He started telling me about Android programming and said that he wanted to look into it.” From there, it really took off. With help from a few online tutorials, Homework Pro was beginning to materialize. “We thought it was perfect,” Lanham said. “We’re both in high school and can market it to all of our friends.”
Work on the app began in January 2014 over winter break. Homework Pro was not perfect at first, remarked Lanham: “It was a little rough at first. It was first published in March of this year, but we made major updates over the summer and really changed it up a lot.” The summer updates “revamped” the app, and made it more work-conducive, according to Lanham.
Many steps go into making an app, no matter how simple the program may seem, and Lanham explained step by step the process that was utilized in creating Homework Pro. “First, you have to have the idea, which is honestly one of the toughest aspects of it. Then you have to go into the interface, what the user is going to see and what their selections do behind the curtain,” he detailed. He summarized the process in layman’s terms by saying, “So basically you need to put the buttons on the screen, and then make them do what they are [meant] to do.”
The process was painstaking and long. “We spent a lot of time on it over winter break in January, and then into the second semester of my junior year. But really, a lot of the work happened over the summer, where we had a lot more time to get together and work on it,” Michael said. He and his classmate would spend several days a week working on the app, tweaking it and making improvements.
After a summer of hard work, Homework Pro was finally finished and ready for use. “Its best feature is just organizing everything that you have in front of you,” Lanham stated. He acknowledged that especially at Jesuit, people have a lot to deal with on their plates. “This is just a way of sorting it out and getting it to where you can approach your homework in the most efficient manner.”
Lanham summarized the app’s purpose and usefulness as “[bringing] order to an otherwise complicated and messy school life.” But you don’t have to take his word for it. Homework Pro is free on Google Play, right now. If you struggle with organization, or are looking for another way to stay organized, this is a great option created by one of Jesuit’s very own. Just look for the yellow paper clip.
