FOR one West Vancouver high school, there is now an app for that.
Earlier this month, four Grade 11 students at West Vancouver's Sentinel secondary released the first version of the school's iPhone, iPad and iPod application on iTunes.
Created by Adam Mitha, Jun Jeagal, Sailesh Suri and Justin Wong, the application allows students to check class schedules, upcoming school events and announcements. It includes the typical information that would be found in an agenda, such as a timetable, calendar, gym schedule or course booklet and a list of important dates.
"The application is meant to give general information to students," said Mitha. "On the main screen you have the block rotation for each day and it will tell you what classes you have and at what times."
The app also offers an interactive map of the school, making it easier for new students to find their way around. Students can also visit teachers' websites directly from the app.
Sentinel vice-principal Mike Finch said the four students learned how to make the application from scratch. It took them 30 tries before they came up with the finished product.
"I think the boys are pretty humble in the approach in what they are talking about," said Finch.
"They put over 300 man hours of their spare time into this. This was not a course and this is not something that they had class time for. This is a passion of theirs that they did in their own time."
The project originally began in 2009 when work experience and information technology teacher Joel Gibson came up with the idea of creating an application for the school district.
Suri, Mitha, Jeagal, Wong and a handful of other Sentinel students began the basic development of the app, but the project was short-lived.
"We took a bunch of Sentinel students in our IT class and gathered them up. They were interested in creating an application," Suri said. "However, within a few months our team just disintegrated because not everybody was that interested."
But in late 2010, Gibson encouraged Suri to go back to the development of the app. Suri along with Mitha, Jeagal, Wong and some other West Vancouver high school students began laying out the basic framework for the application.
In September, Mitha, Jeagal, Suri and Wong switched the focus of the project to the development of an application specifically for Sentinel.
For most of the semester the guys would get together on weekends and work on developing, coding and organizing. By December, the Sentinel app was almost complete and only needed minor adjustments.
"We actually manually coded everything," Suri said.
According to Mitha, apps that are designed for Apple can only be developed on a Mac computer, which made things challenging for the group because only Mitha and Wong had Macs.
Mitha and Wong worked on developing and coding on a Mac computer while Suri and Jeagun worked on everything they could that didn't require using a Mac. "We would be spending around 10 hours day just coding all day long." Suri said. "We would work with what we had. So if I had a PC I would do everything I could and Adam and Justin would do developing and coding on a Mac."
The group only had $350 which was used to pay for a website and some other small parts of the project.
The Grade 11 students are hoping to find some younger Sentinel students to take over the responsibilities of updating and maintaining the application before they graduate and leave the project behind.
"That is one of our main discussions among us: What is going to happen when we graduate?" Mitha said. "We can teach them how to use the app and update the app, that way it won't die out."
Since the Sentinel app was released it has received praise from students, staff and parents.
"Our district IT personnel are extremely impressed and blown away by the whole thing," Finch said.
Sentinel principal Jeannette Laursoo, said Jeagal, Mitha, Suri, and Wong have left a legacy for future Sentinel students.
"It's a gift that they have given to the students at our school because it's going to help them be more organized, more informed, and they will be able to better connect to the teacher's website," she said.
