Congratulations to AHS Junior Mori Finlayson-Johnecheck on winning the Congressional App Challenge for Massachusetts Fifth Congressional District. This was a fitting recognition of Mori’s BlockStatus application, a scheduling tool currently used by at least 1,200 AHS students. Realizing that he and his fellow students were challenged to manage their changing schedules, keep up to date on the latest AHS news, and coordinate lunches, Mori thought that a scheduling application would be useful. He was familiar with one for schedule tracking at Lexington High School, and with this serving as the initial concept, he created an application focused around AHS.
Mori estimates that he has spent hundreds of hours over the past three years as he worked on creating and improving the application. Along the way he was challenged by the need to integrate the school information systems with BlockStatus in real time and adjusting to changes in formatting. He figured out how to integrate multiple services such as Google Docs,
Calendar, Instagram, and the Lunch Menu. He also had to determine how to distribute the information at scale with efficiency and affordability, admitting that this “...took a few tries to figure out.”
When Mori first conceived of the application, he received advice from AHS Mathematics and Computer Science teacher Clayton Jones, who supported his classwork related to the development. At the end of his Sophomore year, Mori worked on BlockStatus as a class project with support from Computer Science teacher Dan Sheldon who also provided recommendations as to future development. Guidance on how to best integrate the application with the school systems continues to come from Instructional Technology Specialist Jeffrey Snyder.
The first version of BlockStatus was only on Mori’s phone, and in April of 2022 there were about 20 other students who served as testers after seeing it and wanting to give it a try. The first public version was available in May 2022, and over 100 students signed-up in the first week. Further acceptance came in waves as word spread from the testers to the rest of the student body. In 2023 BlockStatus became available for teachers as well.
Mori continues to maintain and improve the application, and has tracked the time he spends working on the app with GitHub Codespaces. This usually takes between five to fifteen hours per week, with the time dependent upon whether or not he is making improvements. It is not clear at this point whether Mori will continue maintaining the application once he leaves AHS, or whether he can make it low-maintenance enough to be able to hand it over to another student administrator. This decision remains to be seen.
Mr. Snyder learned of the Congressional App Challenge, and suggested that Mori take part. Participants compete against others in their Congressional district, and winners are named from each one. All the winners are invited to a reception and to take part in #HouseOfCode where they can demonstrate their applications and connect with Representatives and other coders. This will take place in April 2024 and hopefully Mori will be able to attend.
In summary, Mori has this to say: “I am really gratified by the number of users of this app. It was my goal to make something useful for everyone in the AHS community and it has been very nice to see it play out successfully. I’m thankful for all of the people who have helped shape BlockStatus and made it possible to be in the state it is today.” Click here to hear from Mori and understand how BlockStatus works.