When the San Jose Unified School District rolled out its new web-based student information system earlier this year, students immediately noticed some shortcomings.
For one, they no longer could view their current grades for all their classes at one glance. Checking on several classes required several clicks—which for a 16-year-old is, like, so much work.
Instead of settling, Daniel Brooks, then a senior at Pioneer High School, came up with a Silicon Valley-style fix: He developed an iPhone app.
Then he got Apple’s approval to hawk it on the App Store, handed out hundreds of fliers, and now has 2,300 users who downloaded it across the country.
“It ended up on every iPhone and iPad and portable device that any student and teacher had on campus,” said Scott Peterson, a Pioneer High English teacher who doubles as the campus tech support.
In the months since, Daniel has experienced the highs and lows familiar to many software developers who have created wildly popular apps—although he’s getting them a little earlier in his career than most. Daniel’s app is so successful that users want more; in particular, his teachers started pushing him to develop a version for them. But he’s received less enthusiasm from the company whose technology he improved: software developer Infinite Campus, which developed the web-based student information system accessible by teachers, parents, and students.
Daniel said he didn’t write the app to get rich: The app is free. “A student is not going to want to pay 99 cents,” Daniel said. “They just want to see their grades nice and easy.”
Users in 250 school districts across the country also downloaded Daniel’s IC Connector. Infinite Campus, the No. 2 maker nationally of K-12 school and student information systems, has contracts with nearly 50 California school districts, including South San Francisco, San Ramon, Santa Cruz, and Palo Alto.
Peterson embedded a link to IC Connector on the Pioneer High web site. In the spring, the app was getting more than 200 uses daily on its busiest days.
But Daniel, who developed the app without the cooperation of Minnesota-based Infinite Campus, found the company and school district less enthusiastic.
Both he and his father, software engineer Michael Brooks, eMailed the company to seek its cooperation and later see if it was interested in purchasing the app. The elder Brooks received only one eMail message in reply; it said using Infinite Campus’ name and logo in the app’s name confused users and constituted a copyright violation.
Michael Brooks eMailed offering to change the name, but asking for time to get Apple’s approval. Daniel also eMailed and called. They got no response.
Eric Creighton, Infinite Campus’ chief operating officer, said the company simply wanted the Brookses to make clear that they weren’t offering an official Infinite Campus app. The company doesn’t outsource software development nor encourage third parties, he said, and plans to release its own free iPhone app next month.
Creighton acknowledges receiving the Brooks’ eMails. “I didn’t respond. Our nonresponse was, ‘We’re fine,’ ” he said. “Silence on our part was the appropriate communication.”
Daniel and his dad said that being ignored was “just weird.”
Daniel’s graduation compounded his difficulties, leaving him without an Infinite Campus school account, although his family has one for his younger sister.
Because he has no sample account to test how his app works in San Jose Unified and other school districts, IC Connector often crashes, Daniel said.
San Jose Unified’s Infinite Campus portal will reopen for the new school year in a couple of weeks, allowing families to see grades, assignments, schedules, and attendance. The district’s technology director, Mitzi Macon, hopes it will include an updated version of Infinite Campus.
The district purchased the system, which integrated all its student data, two years ago for $650,000. Annual maintenance and support costs about $280,000.
Daniel, who heads to California Polytechnic State University-San Luis Obispo this fall as a freshman, continues to try to improve the app and hopes to put out an Android version soon. Still, he feels snubbed by the company and school districts for not cooperating more. “I have a working app that could be really useful, but they don’t want to use it,” he says.
Infinite Campus maintains that it isn’t hostile to Daniel. “We have a soft spot for kids hacking out tech solutions for the betterment of schools,” Creighton said. The company’s founder, Charlie Kratsch, began his IT career in high school, developing software for school districts in Minnesota.
In the spring, the company even offered Daniel a summer internship at its suburban Minneapolis headquarters.
No thanks, said Daniel. “I already have a good job here,” he said—a paid internship creating apps and doing other programming for marketing services firm SolutionSet. “And,” he said, “I can work from home.”
LINK TO STORY: http://articles.latimes.com/2011/sep/23/business/la-fi-student-app-20110923
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