Fishers High School junior Vinay Krishnan wanted to help his fellow students’ study habits when the coronavirus pandemic forced schools to close in March 2020.
“I wanted to make a difference in the school, and given the times we were all in, I just wanted to make sure COVID-19 didn’t destroy all means of communication (between students),” he said. “I thought creating an app would allow us to have that interaction.”
Krishnan served as the lead for the three-person FHS team that developed the app. Senior David Kim and junior Aaron Ni also were on the team. Krishnan had the idea for a StudyPals app in May and the team started developing the app in June. It took two months to create.
The FHS students recently earned honorable mention for the 5th District Congressional App Challenge award. Krishnan said it was the team members’ first time participating in the competition, so they didn’t know what to expect.
“Any recognition we could get was a blessing, so we were pretty proud we got honorable mention,” he said. “The StudyPals app we developed allows students from different schools to organize and communicate on academic and other school-related topics. Due to the coronavirus pandemic, it became harder for students to study together.”
Krishnan said the StudyPals app allows students to communicate, ask questions and create study groups.
“As students, we make many different connections through friends, peers, mentors and teachers as we progress along our educational path,” Krishnan said. “This app has been developed to help categorize specific subject areas of interest students have into specific chat rooms and conversations.”
Krishnan said the app provides students an organized platform to manage topic-related connections they have in a class and helps maintain connections with friends and teachers as they pursue different interests.
“The app also has a feature of ‘explore’ that enables students to ask questions on a specific topic that they need assistance with or are curious about that is academically related,” Krishnan said. “The explore feature also can organize specific questions into categories like math, science and reading. The questions can be answered by any user that has the app downloaded. As a result, the community generated by the app is supporting students via this academic portal for peer-to-peer learning. We are planning on uploading the app onto the App Store soon.”
Krishnan said feedback from fellow students was to first make the app specific to Fishers High School before expanding it.
