Educational institutions have to go through a lot of trouble when it comes to circulating a certain message among students staff etc. These announcements come with rather a short notice with the requirement of quick propagation. Ideally this problem is addressed by circulating an email or the worst case scenario, calling each one of them individually. But with experience we all know that calling one by one is a costly action and not everybody tends to check their emails. A simple yet effective solution was brought to light for this problem at the TADHack 2015 by an innovative group of young entrepreneurs in Jaffna. Team JoomTriggers was one of the six teams that hacked at the TADHack 2015 which was simultaneously held in Colombo and Jaffna respectively. The event extended to Jaffna for the first time in TADHack history this year in search of enthusiastic innovative hackers.
Team JoomTriggers was made up of Gnanakeethan Balasubramaniam, Dayanantha Shanmugardnam and Thavabalan Thirunilavan who shared the passion of coming up with a solution to this problem they had to face on a daily basis. Interestingly Gnanakeethan being still a school boy has taken a very keen interest in solving this issue with the tech knowledge he possesses.
The team created a timetable management solution with automatic schedule and notification system specially focused on private education sector. Inspired by their own experiences, the team came up with an app called INQURTIME that enables institutions to keep their students informed ahead of time of urgent announcements, timetable changes, etc. INQURTIME is a reliable way to prompt a student at the right place, at the right time, with the right piece of information.
The solution was put into action by incorporating hSenid Mobile’s SMS and USSD APIs. “Messages are broadcast to all students who have subscribed to this app and they will receive updates from the institute via a short code. Automatic messages or reminders will also be sent periodically at scheduled times,” explained Gnanakeethan.
