So it’s official, my largest project ever is out. “myPredictedGrade” was accepted onto the App Store on September 5th, but the stable, download-ready binary was accepted by Apple early this morning. You can find myPredictedGrade on the App Store here.
myPredictedGrade is a tool for students in the International Baccalaureate Diploma Program (IBDP) (which I am currently enrolled in), which is notorious for its massive work loads and comprehensive curriculum. Since students who take the IBDP have their final exams in May of their senior year, students are given “predicted grades” which they use to get into university.
These predicted grades are more important in some sense compared to the final grades especially if a student is applying to American universities since these universities will give “unconditional” offers opposed to UK or Hong Kong universities.
The way I have been tracking my predicted grade over the past 12 months has been through putting all of my assessments into an Excel spreadsheet and then using formulas to calculate everything. However, I realized that most people won’t bother to do this due to its complexity. I also knew that students still really care about their grades, and so if I designed an iPhone app for them so that they could record their grades, they would likely be inclined to use it since it is a simple method of monitoring their academic progress.
So with this idea in my head, I started working on “myPredictedGrade” last December. Since then, I generally worked on the app for one or two hours each week. This was later at night if I had finished all of the school work I needed to get done. So as you can imagine this did mean slow and steady progress, but with an emphasis on slow.
I eventually finished a “prototype” of sorts before this summer and started shipping it out to friends for testing. I thought that this process was going to be them mostly being like “oh well I found a bug” and then I would fix it and then once that was all over, I would release the app. However, I found that they had lots of feedback in terms of the functionality. Therefore, this testing process lasted from late July until early September where I was constantly adding new things to the app and making it better.
I think this testing process was invaluable and really has developed the professionalism of myPredictedGrade.
This morning I stood up in my school’s weekly assembly and showcased the promo video that I made for the app (link can be found here). What really surprised me was the amount of applause that I received after the video finished. I wasn’t really expecting that strong of a response, but it seems I was right in terms of gauging the need for an app like this.
I just check iTunes Connect, and I currently have 25 downloads excluding any downloads from today, so already I’m really happy with my progress. My other app on the App Store, myRecycle, reached the 26 download mark, and so I know that I’ve already beaten my record due to the downloads from today.
My plan for the next couple of months is to bring this to other schools in Hong Kong. If I can advocate that this app has been extremely useful/popular in RCHK, then I can possibly expand my user base to include these other students. I am also going to post the app on the IBO Reddit page so hopefully, I can get a substantial quantity of downloads from there. Furthermore, if the app becomes successful enough in Hong Kong (and in other parts of the world) then I may approach IB and see if they will either start promoting it or potentially even buy it from me.
The possibilities are exciting and I’m looking forward to developing the functionality and making the app even more useful. Here are some screenshots of the app!
Benjamin Paul Lowry 