My journey of building this app has been quite thrilling. I would often take my brother to the park to play after school. While watching the kids play on the playground encountered a couple of girls who needed math help. I tutored them as much as I could in my limited time but then realized that there was a problem that needed to be addressed. There were students who needed help and students who could tutor them, both in our neighborhood. They just needed to be connected. So the idea of creating an app came about. 

An exciting idea, but needed a lot of planning. I was lucky to have found a friend who was into developing apps. I researched app development and ran ideas by him. As simple as a matching-making app may sound, it requires a lot of creativity and critical thinking. I would sit and create a flowchart for the tutors and the students’ profiles and in a couple of hours I would change most of the features and the corresponding flowcharts. With schoolwork to take care of alongside, this wasn’t easy. It took me a few weeks to prepare just the layout of the app. 

Next was the design phase. My friend and I worked very closely on this together. It was helpful that he had a little experience in developing apps but we had a huge learning curve ahead of us. After researching we decided to go with Dart as our programming language and Firebase as the database. Initially, we were programming everything from scratch which made it very difficult but then we stumbled upon the Google Material UI library that provided us many functions that we could use as part of our code. We found this to be extremely helpful and a lifesaver for us!

Many glitches came along the way. Plenty of things we learned and implemented. Some workarounds we had to do, for example editing the profile after the initial creation was not an easy task, but we worked around these issues and managed to complete our app. Testing was done and then the launching phase. The world is full of surprises, we found out much later that it takes many months and approvals before the app can be published on the Apple store. To work around it we decided to make it into a web app so we could deploy it sooner and have students and tutors use it.