Early Childhood Tracking

Date: November 2018, Junior year of high school

Similar to my involvement with the timer, Mr. Andruschak approached me with a technology problem in our district. The individual responsible for early childhood screening and enrollment, was having issues with her data set. She asked if the Tech Department could build her a solution, which we did.

The first step to solving any problem, is understanding exactly what the problem is. Mr. Andruschak told me she was having issues with using google sheets. While that was somewhere to start, we needed to know what exactly the issues were if we were going to be able to help her. We had a conference call with her, and learned that she had thousands of kids, and needed to sort them by their age, by their early childhood screening date, and if they were all under the age of six.

We considered a few options for how to solve her problem. 

1: Create an app which could be custom tailored to her needs.

2: Create a database solution on a server which would serve her specific needs.

3: Optimize google sheets capabilities.

We decided to maximize google sheets' potential, as it was the easiest way for us to accomplish the task. To do that, I created some custom script (below) to meet her needs. 

This function returns all of the children who are eligible for screening.

This function returns all children who are younger than 6 years old.

This function returns children who are eligible for kindergarten.

Every task we sought out to accomplish, we did. We solved every problem that she asked us to do, but we were not satisfied. In our vision, we sought to automate the various tasks, and make the whole experience much more user friendly. Google sheets has its limitations, and we had to stop where we were.