As Novac/Barbara Ban writes on the 6th of March, 2020, behind the name T \ ‘n \’ D Web hides a young maths and computer science duo – Toni Borina and Damir Numic-Mesa, Croatian students. These two outstanding graduates from Pula High School facilitated the easier work of their professors, as well as their colleagues at the school, with their project, marking another incredible piece of innovation made in Croatia.
Working together with the mentorship of Professor Nikola Vujacic, in a mere two months, the students created a web application within the project “School in the Palm of your Hand”, which has already come to life among high school students across Pula.
The Croatian students’ product has only been ”out” for a month, and it is already widely used by professors and students because it provides them with the necessary information about the school’s schedule and free classrooms in a very simple way. It can also be used to send SMS messages to inform people of all the important things that are happening in the school.
”School in the Palm of your Hand” is a project consisting of four websites that make it easier for students and professors in their every day ”school lives”. The app can be used to create approvals for extracurricular activities, for example. There is also an interactive school schedule that can be used to search for schedules by professor, classroom, class and subject, and you can also choose to search for schedules in free classrooms that are available for a lecture,” explains Damir.
He says that in conjunction with the technology giant from Vodnjan, Infobip, they also created an SMS notification system that allows students to easily send messages.
”This system may, for example, be used by the headmaster to inform students about the absence of a professor and who is giving a lecture or the like, which students wouldn’t otherwise be able to find out. At the same time, there is a fourth webpage within the app, the Search Encyclopedia, expressed through the Google Custom Search platform, which allows you to search for specific terms or pages,” the student says.
The application is available on the Internet at www.skolanadlanu.hr and can also be downloaded on mobile phones. Consideration is also being given to having it placed on the Google Play Store. Toni explains that the Croatian students came up with this idea because their school is big and it often happens that students waste a lot of time finding, for example, one of the professors they need.
”Often there was confusion about the replacements of professors, so we’d not know if there would be substitutes and who would hold our classes,” says Toni, who has been working with Damir since the beginning of their high school days.
The app is yet another example of innovation not only made in Croatia, but made by Croatian students, and has been in use since February the 7th, 2020.
”It took us two months to complete the project, and the learning of programming languages alone took place as part of a one-year workshop conducted Istria County’s Technical Culture Community. The process of learning programming languages has been a long one, in fact, you’re constantly learning because you can never actually know everything, and then you start working slowly. We really worked hard on the application every day,” Damir notes.
They say that they have tested it out on their colleagues, but also that they are constantly improving it.
”Applications should always be improved. For example, we noticed that the search was slow, so we sped it up,” Toni points out.
Otherwise, the application, after being developed, was submitted to the county IT and software development competition, where it rightly earned 95 percentage points and won first place, and later it was submitted to a national competition, where the project was rated at 61.5 percent points. But for these young IT creatives who would like to enroll in Zagreb’s FER after high school, this isn’t the first project of its kind. During the last school year, they tried to programme another platform to help the school.
”Eight icons – The first project we did, was part of a larger team of eight students. The result of this project can be seen at the entrance to our school, at the info point. It has eight icons that make it easy to notify and display current information about school activities, schedules, and more. It’s a little bit like this app,” Damir tells us.
Also interesting was the students’ collaboration with the wildly successful Infobip, which came about because some former high school students from Pula also work there.
”We needed the equipment and that’s how we started working with Infobip. For example, they bought us computers for the library and donated some of their old equipment to us. Then we decided it would be good for the students to see how that company functions. And so it all started. Then it spread to other schools, but we were the pioneers in this,” says the students’ mentor, Vujacic.
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