November 11, 2014 at 14:41How much to eat pizza to create a service for students
As a student, you often face the problem of quickly receiving relevant information from classmates and teachers. For example, reschedule classes, requests to enter documents in the dean’s office, unexpected control tests, and so on. Often, obtaining important information even after an hour can be critical, for example, if the teacher began to set off the tests for free, but you did not have time, because you found out about it later.
We created Edusty , a service that solves this problem.
We encountered this problem when we were still students. We had a group in a social network where our classmates published various information and materials on their studies. To keep abreast of the latest news of the group, you had to go there constantly, because you never know when new information may appear. In reality, of course, no one sat and did not refresh the page every 5 minutes, in connection with which there were often cases of a couple arriving which was canceled and other unpleasant consequences.
Having entered the magistracy, the question arose of choosing the topics for master's theses. It so happened that three people from our group turned to one teacher with a request to become a supervisor, to which he proposed the idea of educational service, which was divided into three master's theses. A fortunate combination of circumstances was that we could implement the service on three mobile platforms at once without searching for third-party developers, since each of us was a little able to develop for a particular operating system (iOS, Android, Windows / Windows Phone), as well as Our supervisor organized an office for free. The only problem was the lack of nearby cafes or other places where you can satisfy your hunger. We made an important decision for us - to order pizza over the Internet. After that,
The initial idea was far from the final result, it was assumed that the service will have electronic courses, an interactive class schedule, a journal of attendance and performance, tests, etc. During my graduate studies, it turned out that our topics were not enough for scientific research, so the topics had to be changed to others, only remotely related to the service. However, the service itself was not abandoned and was brought to the stage of closed beta testing on a group of students at our university. According to its results, it turned out that due to the abundance of the functions of the service, each of which was not perfected and thought through to the end, it was difficult to use the service. Therefore, we decided to revise the concept of the service, start its development from scratch and focus on one function - instant notification of students about events in the group. The start of the new project was given on July 22, 2014, after defending master's theses, in connection with which we were able to give the project 5 days a week (by that time 59 pizzas had already been eaten). After about a month and a half, the Edusty app was already available in four app stores: App Store, Google Play, Windows Store, Windows Phone Store.
The service is a platform for notifying students. It works very simply - enter through a social network, choose a university and a group. After that, you can write a message or send a photo and all your classmates (who have chosen the same group) will instantly receive a push notification on any modern device: smartphone, tablet, laptop or PC.
Initially, it was thought that the application could be authorized only through the account of one of the social networks (VK, Facebook, Odnoklassniki, Google+). It was not planned to do registration through an internal account, as this additionally burdens the user with remembering the username and password, and us - writing a bunch of extra code (a lot of extra eaten pizzas) and responsibility for storing personal data. When the application was ready, we sent it to all 4 stores for certification and publication.
Android version passed without any questions during the day, however, like the Windows Phone version.
With the Windows Store version, I had to tinker a bit longer. To test the application, we created a VK account and applied a username and password from it for the team of testers of each store. However, due to the fact that the Windows Phone tester team was located in Russia, and the team from the Windows Store in the USA, the account was temporarily blocked due to the nature of VK security policy. However, after unlocking and resending for certification, there were no problems.
The most interesting thing was waiting for us when publishing in the App Store. After 10 days, publication was refused. Since the application had the possibility of authorization only through social networks and we did not use any other functionality of these networks, the team of testers considered that we were forcing the user to give their personal data
and was asked to create their own authorization. Understanding that we cannot use any other functionality of social networks now, we decided to make it possible to log in through the internal service account.
As a result, the service cost us 102 eaten pizzas with a total value of 43 530 ₽. A pre-ordered discount card was the strategically correct decision.
In the future, we will talk about how our service works, how we tested it on live people and what problems arose.
We created Edusty , a service that solves this problem.
A bit of history
We encountered this problem when we were still students. We had a group in a social network where our classmates published various information and materials on their studies. To keep abreast of the latest news of the group, you had to go there constantly, because you never know when new information may appear. In reality, of course, no one sat and did not refresh the page every 5 minutes, in connection with which there were often cases of a couple arriving which was canceled and other unpleasant consequences.
Having entered the magistracy, the question arose of choosing the topics for master's theses. It so happened that three people from our group turned to one teacher with a request to become a supervisor, to which he proposed the idea of educational service, which was divided into three master's theses. A fortunate combination of circumstances was that we could implement the service on three mobile platforms at once without searching for third-party developers, since each of us was a little able to develop for a particular operating system (iOS, Android, Windows / Windows Phone), as well as Our supervisor organized an office for free. The only problem was the lack of nearby cafes or other places where you can satisfy your hunger. We made an important decision for us - to order pizza over the Internet. After that,
The initial idea was far from the final result, it was assumed that the service will have electronic courses, an interactive class schedule, a journal of attendance and performance, tests, etc. During my graduate studies, it turned out that our topics were not enough for scientific research, so the topics had to be changed to others, only remotely related to the service. However, the service itself was not abandoned and was brought to the stage of closed beta testing on a group of students at our university. According to its results, it turned out that due to the abundance of the functions of the service, each of which was not perfected and thought through to the end, it was difficult to use the service. Therefore, we decided to revise the concept of the service, start its development from scratch and focus on one function - instant notification of students about events in the group. The start of the new project was given on July 22, 2014, after defending master's theses, in connection with which we were able to give the project 5 days a week (by that time 59 pizzas had already been eaten). After about a month and a half, the Edusty app was already available in four app stores: App Store, Google Play, Windows Store, Windows Phone Store.
About service
The service is a platform for notifying students. It works very simply - enter through a social network, choose a university and a group. After that, you can write a message or send a photo and all your classmates (who have chosen the same group) will instantly receive a push notification on any modern device: smartphone, tablet, laptop or PC.
Publish Issues
Initially, it was thought that the application could be authorized only through the account of one of the social networks (VK, Facebook, Odnoklassniki, Google+). It was not planned to do registration through an internal account, as this additionally burdens the user with remembering the username and password, and us - writing a bunch of extra code (a lot of extra eaten pizzas) and responsibility for storing personal data. When the application was ready, we sent it to all 4 stores for certification and publication.
Android version passed without any questions during the day, however, like the Windows Phone version.
With the Windows Store version, I had to tinker a bit longer. To test the application, we created a VK account and applied a username and password from it for the team of testers of each store. However, due to the fact that the Windows Phone tester team was located in Russia, and the team from the Windows Store in the USA, the account was temporarily blocked due to the nature of VK security policy. However, after unlocking and resending for certification, there were no problems.
The most interesting thing was waiting for us when publishing in the App Store. After 10 days, publication was refused. Since the application had the possibility of authorization only through social networks and we did not use any other functionality of these networks, the team of testers considered that we were forcing the user to give their personal data
and was asked to create their own authorization. Understanding that we cannot use any other functionality of social networks now, we decided to make it possible to log in through the internal service account.Conclusion
As a result, the service cost us 102 eaten pizzas with a total value of 43 530 ₽. A pre-ordered discount card was the strategically correct decision.
In the future, we will talk about how our service works, how we tested it on live people and what problems arose.