Revere middle school students design app to help teachers improve skills

REVERE – Garfield Middle School students Zak Attioui and Camilo Gonzalez have been busy engineering the hottest new application for educators in Revere.The app is called School Tools, and is aimed at helping teachers and students improve their math and ELA skills.”It goes by the Massachusetts standards for math and ELA, and each standard you click on, you will learn something new,” science and technology teacher Erik Halvorsen said during a recent interview.Each standard is linked to various research sources and Youtube videos to help teachers on that subject. Attioui and Camilo found all of the resources on their own.The pair started working on the app a month ago.Halvorsen is quick to give the students most of the praise for the successful project.”They are doing it as an independent study. They are the ones with all the initiative. We just give them the space to work on it. They do all the work,” he said.The two students found the experience an entertaining way to spend their time.”It’s just fun,” Gonzalez said.However, there has some been difficulties along the way. The students have been using the program Flash to create the app and sometimes it can get a little complicated.”Programming can be confusing sometimes. If you put one wrong piece in the code, it can all go wrong,” Attioui said.”Yesterday, we were having a problem with one code because we used the space bar too much. Once we found out, we had to go back and delete some of the spaces,” Gonzalez added.The duo plans on creating more apps for School Tools.”We want to make ones for science and geography. We just want to see how these go first,” Gonzalez said.The app is scheduled to be finished by the end of the school year. Both Attioui and Gonzalez are excited to see the final product.”It will be cool to see our teachers use the app,” Attioui said.Their teacher is also equally enthusiastic about the project.”It’s pretty neat. There is nothing like it,” Halvorsen said.Attioui and Gonzalez both plan on developing more apps after they leave Garfield. They are even thinking about starting a mobile apps and PC software company.”This is something we definitely want to keep doing,” Gonzalez said.The pair have been blogging about their experience developing their app. To learn more check out http://schooltoolsgms.blogspot.com/