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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

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.

mfld 2y ago
They still have a paper planner. :) But checking the app each morning is mandatory. And in my son's case, there are changes every couple of days.
- didntcheck 2y ago
  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
- al_borland 2y ago
  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?
  - mfld 2y ago
    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.
    - nemomarx 2y ago
      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.
- crtasm 2y ago
  The app or the website, right? If this is your blog please add "Show HN: " to the title here.
  - mfld 2y ago
    Correct. And thanks for the remark.
  - beala 2y ago
    I don't think there is a rule that your own work must be tagged with Show HN. You can opt-in to Show HN if > you've made something that other people can play with. HN users can try it out, give you feedback, and ask questions in the thread. [1] but afaik nothing in the guidelines [2] requires it. 1: https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html 2: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
    - crtasm 2y ago
      I see - thankyou
- dragonsky67 2y ago
  It's no wonder that kids are so stressed/anxious these days, seems not even their school classes are certain.
- prmoustache 2y ago
  Looks like a very chaotic school.
jeroenhd 2y ago
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.
- mfld 2y ago
  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.
  - TRiG_Ireland 2y ago
    It's not just kids. It would put me on the wrong track too.
  - jeroenhd 2y ago
    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.
whimsicalism 2y ago
i don't think there is much value in teaching a paper planner
- II2II 2y ago
  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.
  - whimsicalism 2y ago
    sure as long as you are allowed to use your own notebook for planning and not graded based on formatting in a certain way
JoshTriplett 2y ago
> 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.
yapyap 2y ago
> Kids are getting scheduling via apps now? yeah, they’ve been for a while
Larrikin 2y ago
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.
sourcepluck 2y ago
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 :)
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- mlinhares 2y ago
  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.
  - sourcepluck 2y ago
    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.
paranoidrobot 2y ago
> 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. [1] https://github.com/lanrat/homeplate https://github.com/lanrat/homeplate [2] https://github.com/sibbl/hass-lovelace-kindle-screensaver https://github.com/sibbl/hass-lovelace-kindle-screensaver
zellyn 2y ago
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!
- Moru 2y ago
  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...
space_oddity 2y ago
The project itself is super cool. It's a modern take on managing schedules, but it feels more deliberate than just another app notification
maccard 2y ago
> 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.
- dotancohen 2y ago
  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.
  - ben_w 2y ago
    Is cash the only thing that gives that benefit? 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).
Cthulhu_ 2y ago
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.
- jhrmnn 2y ago
  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.
arrowsmith 2y ago
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. Why is this complicated?

mfld 2y ago

They still have a paper planner. :) But checking the app each morning is mandatory. And in my son's case, there are changes every couple of days.

didntcheck 2y ago
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
al_borland 2y ago
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?
- mfld 2y ago
  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.
  - nemomarx 2y ago
    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.
crtasm 2y ago
The app or the website, right? If this is your blog please add "Show HN: " to the title here.
- mfld 2y ago
  Correct. And thanks for the remark.
- beala 2y ago
  I don't think there is a rule that your own work must be tagged with Show HN. You can opt-in to Show HN if > you've made something that other people can play with. HN users can try it out, give you feedback, and ask questions in the thread. [1] but afaik nothing in the guidelines [2] requires it. 1: https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html 2: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
  - crtasm 2y ago
    I see - thankyou
dragonsky67 2y ago
It's no wonder that kids are so stressed/anxious these days, seems not even their school classes are certain.
prmoustache 2y ago
Looks like a very chaotic school.

jeroenhd 2y ago

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.

mfld 2y ago
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.
- TRiG_Ireland 2y ago
  It's not just kids. It would put me on the wrong track too.
- jeroenhd 2y ago
  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.

whimsicalism 2y ago

i don't think there is much value in teaching a paper planner

II2II 2y ago
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.
- whimsicalism 2y ago
  sure as long as you are allowed to use your own notebook for planning and not graded based on formatting in a certain way

JoshTriplett 2y ago

> 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.

yapyap 2y ago

> Kids are getting scheduling via apps now? yeah, they’ve been for a while

Larrikin 2y ago

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.

sourcepluck 2y ago

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 :)

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
mlinhares 2y ago
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.
- sourcepluck 2y ago
  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.

paranoidrobot 2y ago

> 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. [1] https://github.com/lanrat/homeplate https://github.com/lanrat/homeplate [2] https://github.com/sibbl/hass-lovelace-kindle-screensaver https://github.com/sibbl/hass-lovelace-kindle-screensaver

zellyn 2y ago

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!

Moru 2y ago
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...

space_oddity 2y ago

The project itself is super cool. It's a modern take on managing schedules, but it feels more deliberate than just another app notification

maccard 2y ago

> 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.

dotancohen 2y ago
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.
- ben_w 2y ago
  Is cash the only thing that gives that benefit? 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).

Cthulhu_ 2y ago

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.

jhrmnn 2y ago
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.

arrowsmith 2y ago

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. Why is this complicated?