During the second week of April, junior Ivanya Sadana added finishing touches to her website togabell.org, a free, comprehensive and customizable calendar for students who either struggle with the block schedule or want to see the cafeteria menu in advance.
She worked with Julie Grenier, the district’s director of technology, as well as principal Greg Louie to improve the app’s functionality and receive official approval for it. So far, news of the website has been spread mainly through Louie’s weekly Friday letter and word of mouth.
The website, which took her only three days to build, is simple and easy to navigate. The calendar displays five days at a time (excluding weekends), with each day beginning at 8:30 and ending at 2:35 or 3:45 — depending on whether it’s a Red or Blue Day. Users can customize the site by entering their class names as well as assigning colors to each subject.
An external link embedded on the site takes users to the cafeteria’s current menu.
Making it even more useful, the website can also be installed on cellphones as an app.
According to Sadana, inspiration for the project stemmed from her own confusions about the block schedule. After seeing peers and teachers struggle with the same issue, she decided to build a simple yet effective website to cut down on confusion about whether it’s a Blue Day or a Red Day and what time a certain class occurs.
As far as the actual coding process, Sadana said she used ChatGPT to help with some of the code, but she also did a lot of prompt engineering — refining prompts to ensure the best output from AI models — and created her own domain — establishing her own branded web address.
“The code would [sometimes] just crash, or if I got one prompt wrong and I would have to start over,” she said. “That was pretty challenging.”
However, because encrypting everything for safety was always the plan, coding for security was not as challenging. Having a secure site was important if she wanted it to be approved and endorsed by the school.
Sadana especially wanted the website to be usable for incoming freshmen who haven’t been in a block schedule before.
“I originally made this for myself, but I realized I could help so many other people with it too, so I wanted to share this with the community,” Sadana said.
