School Buddy | Streamlining School Communication

Overview

School Buddy is a multi - functional communication app developed to centralize school announcements, messaging, homework partner matching, club announcements, and extracurricular activity planning into a single platform. This project evaluates whether improving app performance and design can increase user satisfaction across students, teachers, club sponsors, and school administrators. The experiment used a two - phase testing method: participants used a base version of the app for two weeks, completed a mid - experiment survey highlighting how they felt about the app and any errors they encountered, then used an updated version of the app for two more weeks, and finally completed a post - experiment survey. Key usability measures were analyzed using paired - samples t - tests to identify any significant improvements between trials, while additional data on "competitor" apps, such as Band or Remind, and their usage highlighted adoption limitations. Findings from this study aim to determine whether a unified platform can enhance school communication and identify the barriers to its real - world implementation. Overall, the results demonstrated that usability improved for every user group after updates, with several measures exhibiting statistically significant improvements. However, low usage compared to existing applications proved that performance alone isn't enough: School Buddy must integrate more deeply into established workflows to replace multi - platform communication. These findings highlight both the promise of a unified system and the necessary next steps for its practical implementation.

Awards (1)

• Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence: AAAI Student Memberships for each finalist that is part of the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd Prize Winning projects and 5 Honorable Mention winning projects (up to 3 students per project) (in-kind award / part of the 1st-3rd prize)

Competition history

• ISEF 2026 Software Design · Entry SFTD016

Resources

• ISEF abstract page ↗

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