Kids are getting scheduling via apps now? The best thing my school ever did for me was give me a paper planner and teach me how to use it. I've finally reached that "back in my day" age.
It's a neat project though. I wasn't aware Soldered existed so this is a nice find.
Scheduling, and homework assignments, and textbooks [0], and handing in homework, and communicating absences, and asking the teacher a question later in the day in a groupchat, and the teacher sending an extra thing for everyone to read outside of class even just out of general interest, and communicating with peers about something in another class groupchat where the teacher isn't present, and...
Some kids have zero interaction with pen and paper for at least some homeworks, where they'll receive the assignment in a class group, do it on the tablet, send it back there as a PDF, and get back an annotated PDF with the corrections.
Not all schools are doing all of that. Some schools are though, and most seem to have implemented some subset.
While doing this, the kids are not necessarily taught the basics of what's going on on their devices. They tend to not know the difference between, say: a browser and a search engine; a window and a tab; a menu and a tool bar; an operating system and a desktop environment [1].
Source: students of mine, telling me about their schools and how things work.
[0] if there is a textbook. It could just be PDFs of lessons, which could be all from one source or various sources.
[1] until I keep pestering them until they start to see a bit clearer, even though we're not doing computer subjects :)
Isn't it good they don't know these differences? The fact we know is mostly due to poorly designed UX, not some high level concept that needs to be known. Modern phones are a much better UX for most people.
No, I think it's debilitating, disempowering, wholly unnecessary, and that it would be easily solvable if there existed a will to solve it. It's a cultural issue, not a technical one, I mean.
I didn't mean in the first message simply knowing the difference between tabs and windows and a few other GUI bits and bobs, those were meant to be an example of a larger point. The larger point being the notion that it's fun and possible to be a combative, pro-active, "liberated" computer user.
The empowerment of computer users is diametrically opposed however to the interests of Apple, Google, Meta, Microsoft, Tesla, Amazon, etc etc. The ideal computer user for them is one who knows nothing, except exactly what they need to know to keep clicking, commenting, sharing, liking, spewing out their personal details, and fishing out the credit and debit cards.
No need to understand where the data goes, where it is stored, who owns it, what they know about you and what is shared with third parties, what is costs to provide such a service (even though none of its users seem to pay anything), how it is monetized, how dark UI patterns nudge you, how algorithms manipulate you, why you can get addicted to them.
Just click on the friendly little coloured rectangle with the rounded corners. That's the app. That's all you need to know.
> That’s the exact amount knowledge most users want.
Back when I was young I was completely astonished by that mindset... but now that I'm older, I kinda get it. When you gotta juggle 8 hours of work, 2 hours of commute, 1-2 hours of chores, and completely forget about kids or a sane sleep schedule... you don't have the time dealing with bullshit, you need something that works. And you got money to pay for that, too.
Yeah, most of my friends that don't work programming or building computers couldn't care less. I think we try to reflect our own beliefs on what computers should be and how people should interact with them but that is not the reality for most people, they just want to do a thing and click a button, anything else is too much work.
When i was getting a new computer to my father in law the main requirement was that it would be hard for him to do stupid stuff, like install a virus, so we went with a mac. It makes a lot of sense for him to use a very limited device because all he does is browse, watch youtube and listen to music, why does he have to understand all the details of how all of this works at all?
> Just click on the friendly little coloured rectangle with the rounded corners. That's the app. That's all you need to know.
Systems evolve until they reach the maturity of elevators. Press the button, it goes to your floor. Some users might wish they could change the button LED color, make it blink to the elevator music's rhythm and swap the scheduling algorithm on the fly with their custom choice... I guess they are all here !
My mom doesn't want to be a "liberated computer user", she wants to use her phone to watch youtube, see pics of her grandkids and listen to music, she doesn't even care about having social networks. You're projecting your own personal interests into others, the world contains multitudes, not everyone wants to understand every little detail of how computers work.
For most people computers are like cars, they couldn't care less about how they work, as long as they can use them to take them from place A to place B.
This comment is mildly ironic because the same kind of argument has often been used around cars. Do you want to be merely a car driver, or do you want to be a car "operator", who understands (to some level of abstraction) what happens "under the hood" when you manipulate the levers and wheels in your car?
Different strokes for different folks, but never forget, knowledge is power.
Jesus, no. Computer illiteracy is a growing problem, kids and teens nowadays have trouble understanding even the basics of what's going on in their computers apart from "swipe here for the next addictive depressive 5-second slop". That's very very bad at a time when these devices are more and more important in their lives.
When I was a kid, general understanding of computers was so basic that "my computer was struck by lightning and now it is sentient" seemed like a reasonable plot device.
In more practical terms, this extended to things like not understanding why an Acorn-formatted floppy disk, or Doom for Windows, couldn't be read by a Mac.
Naturally, another memory of those days was my dad complaining that "these days" people couldn't understand the electrical circuits because everything was getting replaced with ICs where the only thing you could do if it failed was throw the entire chip away and replace it.
This is hardly new. My high school did this over fifteen years ago. This app just shows hour+subject+teacher+room number. Quite useful on days the hours/rooms get switched around because a teacher is on leave.
Your paper planner won't inform you that your first hour is in another building tomorrow or that the teacher is ill (and yes, the schedules would change less than 12 hours in advance). It's hardly comparable.
As for this project, I'm not sure how wise it is to build something that relies on scraping some unknown third party website when it comes to school schedules. I'd risk it for my own schedule, but if your scraper makes a mistake you'll get your kid in trouble. Maybe the teacher will believe "it's because my parents made this scheduling contraption" as an excuse, but they'll only accept it once or twice if they do. If there's any app I'd completely unlock in parental controls, it's this one, because it only seems to do the bare minimum anyway.
> Quite useful on days the hours/rooms get switched around because a teacher is on leave.
> Your paper planner won't inform you that your first hour is in another building tomorrow or that the teacher is ill (and yes, the schedules would change less than 12 hours in advance).
That seems like a really odd way of handling it, and more confusing than it needs to be. For me the class was assigned to a specific room, not the teacher - so it never moved. If we had a substitute, they'd just be in the normal room instead of the usual teacher. If they couldn't get one in time, then either an administrator would bring us to study hall (highschool) or after 10 minutes we'd just leave assuming they couldn't make it (college).
I guess it's a way of handling it that's enabled by the fact that the calendars are electronic. It could be that this way is easier for the school staff, but honestly I have no idea and can't even begin to guess, really.
Even in 2024, schools in major cities experience staffing shortages where there are not enough supposedly-qualified adults to supervise all of the students in their originally scheduled classrooms.
"Solution": class X, Y, and Z all meet in Lunchroom W on Wednesday so one adult can supervise all of them.
Schools are different all over the world. I believe rooms were assigned to teachers as much as possible, but not every teacher needed a room all day every day so there was the occasional change-up. For instance, sometimes biology/chemistry/physics needing the few lab rooms for experiments, and those had to be scheduled in somehow. That also caused other rooms to bump every now and then.
Generally, a teacher not showing up was no real reason for skipping class (no matter how much urban myths said otherwise) but if the absence was known in advance we'd get a free hour. Most kids used those for some extra homework time or to just hang out, unless the free hour lined up with the start or the end of the day.
We didn't really have study hall, just the normal areas in school that you'd also hang out in during breaks (or holes in the schedule, as older kids with personal schedules occasionally had).
In university this rarely happened, most people would leave after about 30 minutes because a lot of them traveled half an hour or more to get there in the first place. People were a lot less willing to abandon classes once they were paying out of their own pocket for them.
Having had a paper planner in high school I don't recall there really being many issues with rooms needing to be swapped or teachers being ill having an impact. If the teacher is ill, the other teacher just takes their room.
Having a digital schedule almost gives the school the ability to be more relaxed with the schedule, as opposed to it being built around a schedule that can hardly move. There is an important part of school which is revolved around routine. I remember it only took a few weeks in the first term before I'd be walking to classed without needing to read the timetable at all.
It's inevitable that we end up moving down this route, but lets not forget the old solution worked just fine and meant you needed a pretty good reason to change the timetable.
It does sound like a dynamic digital schedule is just an invitation for a school to be sloppy. It's been a long time but I just don't recall situations where schedules changed a lot.
Good points. However unlocking the phone in the morning puts my son on the wrong track: you would be surprised how much time one can spend checking animated gifs by using any text field that will inevitably be unlocked as well.
Of course I will take full responsibility in case of bugs... So far it didn't happen.
I applaud your efforts to keep your son from being addicted to screens.
While I'd be more conservative in the setup (I'd probably go with a device without inputs that turns on just to browse to a website directly, making any browsing mistakes or changed layouts less impactful), I do wish there were better alternatives for parents than "hand your kid a smartphone".
In an ideal world, schools would use some kind of one-way messaging devices to get the benefits of modern technology without the addiction smartphones bring, but I don't think we'll see that any time soon. Perhaps something like a (locked-down) Remarkable e-Ink tablet with a cellular network connection to receive school notifications and schedule updates as well as for doing homework in could prove quite useful, but that also sounds way too expensive for schools at the moment and you'd need to lock it down so that it's no more distracting than a piece of paper.
I can’t recall even one time my high school schedule changed except between semesters, not any time a class met in another room. Not once. If a teacher was out sick, there was a sub but the room didn’t change.
What can I say, my school worked differently and this was a common occurrence. I do believe they tried to minimise room changes or hour changes as much as possible, but you have to do something if the only relevant substitutes would already be teaching another class at the same time.
In my experience, substitute teachers were generally not skilled in a particular subject. There were there to be an adult in the room. They typically had a lesson plan left by the regular teacher, which almost always involved just reading or working problems on your own and did not depend on the sub being able to actually teach the subject.
If you can't find enough substitutes, pay them more instead of spending money on apps to rearrange schedules.
Same for me. Genuinely doesn’t understand what’s the benefits for anyone. Maybe trying to get back "lost" hours when a teacher is sick? I think kids are better served with a stable, secure schedule than one that try to absolutely fit all the modalities decided for that school year.
Imo it should be the school's responsibility to stick a notice on the classroom itself or at least send an email, rather than expect each and every student to check an app every day. I hadn't been a high school student in a while through.
I agree that there should be a physical fallback or sorts, but I think it's helpful to be prepared just in case. If the school is too lazy to display schedule changes at school for some reason, the app becomes a necessity and that's just stupid.
You managed, good for you! Thankfully, we got it better, and kids these days have it even better. I don't see how that's a bad thing, every generation should strive to make things better for the next ones.
I don't think it's "better" to make kids check a multitude of ever-changing apps and screens just to find out their timetable for the day.
What on earth is the point? When I was a kid we just had the same timetable repeating every week. It changed once a year, at the beginning of the academic year, meaning that within a few weeks I knew it from memory and didn't need to keep looking it up.
In the extremely rare event that things deviated from the timetable, the school found a way to tell us. It's not hard to convey a message to a group of students when you know exactly which room they'll physically be in at any given moment; another advantage of a fixed timetable.
If the school can't accomplish such basic tasks as scheduling a simple timetable, that's the adults' problem, not the children's.
I received a paper planner every school year from elementary school until I went to college. In elementary school the teacher would stand over us while we wrote in it.
I constantly would forget it at school. It would get lost at home. If the teacher wasn't reminding us about long running projects from weeks ago it would just be forgotten since I wasn't looking that far back.
Then I got to college and someone showed me that they put their assignments in their Google calendar and told me I could set up alerts in my email and later my phone. There were never any forgotten assignments ever again. Paper planners are provably worthless to me.
> the best thing my school ever did for me was give me a paper planner and teach me how to use it
A sentiment I’ve heard a lot is “how will kids learn the value of money in a cashless society”. The answer, like with the paper planner is “unfortunately the world has changed”. Using a paper calendar or cash isn’t obsolete, but the real trick is learning to schedule/work with money. And in the modern day, you _must_ be able to do this digitally. All my biggest incomes and expenses are digital transactions - my salary, mortgage, insurance, energy bills. Learning to manage cash flow means understanding it in that context.
Scheduling is the same now. If you operate solely on a paper planner in thr modern world you’re going to miss out. My workplace is entirely digital, my golf course, gym, even my barber use digital calendars. I’m not saying a proprietary app is the right move, but a paper scheduler is unfortunately bordering on obsolete.
Even if the money is in flying 747s (it isn't), learning to fly a Cessna at a younger age is still beneficial. Same with cash money and young children.
For what it's worth, I've been in the software field for decades - long enough that I prefer not to use it. My preferred barber loses my business because he only accepts appointments via his app. I'm not installing it, so I cut my hair somewhere else. He knows this, and he's busy enough that the loss of a single old customer isn't compelling enough to get him to waste his time scheduling appointments by phone.
Or was cash just a convenient low-risk mechanism because the pocket money parents give to their kids is in small enough units that they can afford for their kids to waste it or straight up lose it?
If the latter, I suspect even games with internal currencies would provide the same learning opportunities. And I don't mean micro-transactions here, I mean like the SimCity (2000 in particular) or Civilization games where your actions within the game are what makes or consumes the currency.
But it could also be, say, €$£5/week of vouchers for Steam or Amazon or whatever.
(I'm like you when it comes to having been in software too long, and therefore not wanting to install apps for everything).
I think digital money is just too abstract for kids, and even adults struggle with comparing amounts and truly grasping their significance. Handing over a stack of bills just feels a lot more significant than swiping your card, which is the same whether you’re buying a $5 coffee or a $5000 tranche of a home renovation. With cash, you have a lot of the stuff in your hand, and then you have less vs none.
> I think digital money is just too abstract for kids, and even adults struggle with comparing amounts and truly grasping their significance. Handing over a stack of bills just feels a lot more significant than swiping your card, which is the same whether you’re buying a $5 coffee or a $5000 tranche of a home renovation. With cash, you have a lot of the stuff in your hand, and then you have less vs none.
But, that's how the world works. What major bills are you paying that you pay c cash for in the last decade? All the more reason to teach kids to operate in this way.
Well, similar to how Montessori (and now most public schools, it seems) deal in manipulatives first, and then switch to abstract later, I think the same makes sense for money.
And I actually have been going back to cash more often, and I spend noticeably less when I do. And I’m an engineer who loves spreadsheets, so I’m guessing it causes most people bigger spending issues.
Games and such do not have the real-world consequences of cash. I've sent all my kids to go out and e.g. buy some groceries. They learn to count their change and deal with strangers who might not be trustworthy. They learn to protect their wallets and not lose it. They learn to look at price tags. All real world skills that games do not simulate.
> All real world skills that games do not simulate.
Learning to protect and not lose a wallet, or to count change… seems like exactly the kind of thing that no longer matters, as we move to more digital money everywhere. What change, what wallet?
Outside those points: multiplayer games with currencies in them simulate all of the rest, and even single player games simulate some of those things.
But not skills that translate to the biggest outgoings you will have as an adult. It doesn’t prepare you for having your salary appear as a number, and your rent or mortgage disappear as another line.
They’re good building blocks but they’re not enough.
> It's a neat project though. I wasn't aware Soldered existed so this is a nice find.
Quite neat, indeed.
I was thinking this would make a good display for Home Assistant, and what do you know, someone has built a HA integration for it[1].
This lead me down a bit of a rabbit hole - it's using a "screensaver" set up for the Kindle[2], which also lead me into the info about jailbreaking Kindles.
This adds some projects for over the coming break.
Yup, however at the same time there's been an effort to give kids paper planners again as well. Of course, that's been completely ineffective as they still had the apps, all results are published there, and more importantly, last minute schedule updates are still in there too. The school frequently cancels lessons due to teacher shortages; I think they should offer alternatives then, at the very least so that the school days are the same every day. Having to check the night before or even right before leaving if there's any changes is a headache.
When I was in high school 20 years ago, the school published a big sheet of paper on the central notice board, updated each day. Heading there first thing in the morning and seeing whether some of your classes got cancelled was a nice social ritual.
At my high school in South Africa, in the late 80s/early 90s, we had a two-week schedule, so you had to remember not only which day it was, but whether it was week one or week two!
In same timeframe in Sweden we had one schedule with eight different classes every day except the few days when we had a lesson that was two "blocks" long. Everything was in 40 min blocks with a clear pattern of breaks between. We got to copy that down each year by hand on graph paper making the lines and everything. This lead to us mostly knowing our schedules by the second week and hardly having to look at it.
Fast forward a few years and my daughter has 2 different lessons per day, it's communicated with an app and she has to look at it at least twice a week after half a year to figure what day what was.
The best thing ever to only have two subjects per day so you can actually concentrate on the subjects and not try and fail at multitasking the whole time...
> The best thing my school ever did for me was give me a paper planner and teach me how to use it.
While in general I'm a fan of "learn how to do things by hand for didactic value" (e.g. learning how to do long division before using the calculator to do it), I don't think a paper planner provides any didactic value to learn before replacing it with an electronic calendaring tool.
This is a nice project, but personally I'd favor demanding that the school come up with an alternate solution for your son that doesn't require you to supply smartphone. Rather than allowing them to shift the burden to you
Why would there be so many changes? Do they seem legitimate, or more like they are trying to justify spending money on the scheduling system and playing with the new toy?
It is more related to sick leave and general scarcity of teachers. I guess before the existence of timetable apps they were better in finding creative ways around those changes.
In my experience, teacher absences just meant substitutes, another teacher swapping over / handling two classes, or an impromptu class period spent watching something on tv.
I'm not sure that was much better than just telling the students in advance when you know a schedule will change and sending them to the library to study or etc.
I'm also confused by this: "our family’s morning routine [includes] the daily check of the timetable and substitution plan for the kids’ school".
I don't get it. Why is he checking his kids' school timetable in the morning? My parents never needed to know my precise timetable for the day. They just dropped me off at school and picked me up again in the morning.
With many schools banning mobile phones, and similar communications devices, there aren't many alternatives to paper. Also, my elementary school uses paper planners. Given that most elementary schools forbid students from carrying electronics (for no other reason than loss and damage), there isn't much of a choice except paper planners.
It's a neat project though. I wasn't aware Soldered existed so this is a nice find.