Apps for Good Project Proposal

Andrew Yang, Kayla Freeman, and Hazelyn Aroian

Executive Summary

Countless students struggle with procrastination as a major inhibitor in completing

academic work. Procrastination results in assignments piling up, leading to increased stress and

lack of sleep. When procrastination becomes a habit, the constant stress and loss of sleep can

become a lifestyle, which can lead to lowered self-esteem, anxiety, and even depression. Habits

formed earlier in life tend to follow students for the rest of their academic and professional

careers, as demonstrated in an experiment conducted by NYU researchers that found that

children who were able to delay gratification early in life became more successful students and

adults (Janssen, 2015). High school, when students are learning to manage an increased

workload, is a critical time to establish good habits when it comes to time management to give

students the self-confidence and tools they need to succeed throughout life. An app aimed

towards high schoolers that lets students see how many of their peers have completed an

assignment would show how many students are available to help, strengthen school

community as well as create a schoolwide attitude oriented around completing work on time,

and help students determine which assignments are most important to focus on at a specific

point in time.

Introduction
 In our modern educational environment, constant distractions lead to procrastination

and the underdevelopment of time management skills. Procrastination in turn leads to

increased stress, and when prolonged over a period of time can lead to anxiety disorders and

depression (Janssen, 2015). In a NYU study based on a survey administered to 128 high school

juniors, 49% of students reported feeling “a great deal of stress” on a daily level, and 26% of

participants reported symptoms of depression at a clinically significant level (NYU News

Release, 2015).

The independence students have upon beginning college can be daunting. Therefore, it

is imperative to set up a good foundation for time management skills and habits in high school

that will continue throughout higher education. While high school is a more structured

environment, there is a significant change in the workload as compared to middle school, and

students may need an additional push to complete assignments.

Also, it can be difficult to find out what the assignments of the day are because of

absences, as many homework assignments are explained verbally. In addition, when

assignments are given verbally and not uploaded to their teacher page, there is a much higher

chance that a student forgets about a part of the assignment, or about the whole assignment

itself.

Our app will be targeted towards high school students, or students in grades 9 through

12. Many apps in the realm of time management are not aimed towards students in high

school. It is important to set a good foundation for time management and stop the habit of

procrastination early because tasks will only become more intense upon beginning college. Our
app will help give students form good habits and provide the tools they need for success later in

life. In addition, high school students tend to share assignments, which makes shared to-do

apps more in demand.

Our main competition are conventional to-do list apps, such as Microsoft To-Do and the

Apple Notes app. These apps provide their users with simple to-do lists, and the case of

Microsoft To-Do, the user can share their lists with other people. However, in the academic

environment, this is not always helpful, since whenever one student marks an assignment as

completed, it is marked as completed for everyone else. In addition, these apps do not provide

the same motivational potential to the user, because there is less incentive for a user to follow

through and complete their goals. Our app would also provide more aesthetic options that a

high school audience would appreciate.

Specifications

This app will provide a shared to-do list so that students can add common assignments

for classes, but with an individualized option to check it off. This is important because although

platforms like Canvas and Google Classroom are helpful for teachers to assign work directly to

students, students may have different assignments scattered throughout a variety of platforms.

This app would allow students to consolidate their assignments on one platform where all can

be viewed at once. Our app will be designed for Android devices and will be uploaded to the

Google Play Store.

Any student would be able to add an assignment to the list, and this assignment could

then be checked off by every individual student, but checking it off would not change the
assignment to completed for every student. There would be three categories each student

could characterize an assignment as: “started”, “in progress”, and “completed”. There would be

an additional category of “not reported” that would be the default option before a student self-

reports. Each student would be able to update their own status in regards to an assignment and

view how many other people have changed their status, and to which category. This would

provide a motivational incentive for students to begin assignments.

Our app would also provide an option to reach out for help on an assignment that a

student may be struggling with. A question could be asked anonymously, and a student who

had already finished the assignment could answer anonymously. The anonymity would help

alleviate the fear of asking a question that may be viewed as having an obvious answer, and the

anonymity in the response would ensure that the person providing help would not feel

obligated to help if they had many other assignments to complete. Once the question had been

answered, both the question and response would be posted in a classroom forum so that other

students who may have the same question could view the answer.

In order to collect feedback and data from the users, we plan on setting up a support

email for customer feedback and questions. We plan to incorporate their feedback by regularly

checking the email and adding the feedback to a shared Kanban board.

In the future, we plan on adding more social features that allow for more inter-student

communication. One feature that we could add in the future is a leaderboard that shows only

the top three task-completers over the course of different time periods. This feature would

make it so the students that are the best at completing their assignments are recognized by
their school community. It would also not show anyone below the top three, so that people

don’t feel unmotivated if they are not in the top three.

If we had more time, we would also like to make the overall visual experience more

personalized. For example, if the user would like to, they could customize the color scheme of

the app to their personal liking.

References

Carlson, D. (2014). 3 Ways Stress Negatively Affects Student Performance. Retrieved from

https://partners.pennfoster.edu/blog/2016/september/3-ways-stress-negatively-

affects-student-performance.

Janssen, Jill. (2015, May 15). Academic Procrastination: Prevalence Among High School and

Undergraduate Students and Relationship to Academic Achievement. Dissertation,

Georgia State University. Retrieved from https://scholarworks.gsu.edu/epse_diss/103.

NYU News Release. (2015, August 11). NYU Study Examines Top High School Students' Stress

and Coping Mechanisms. Retrieved from https://www.nyu.edu/about/news-

publications/news/2015/august/nyu-study-examines-top-high-school-students-stress-

and-coping-mechanisms.html