These are not easy times for most of us. Schools are closed and the kids are home all day, every day. They can’t be with their grandparents (because they are at risk from Covid-19), so the burden of keeping the kids fed, entertained and educated falls on us, the parents.
We are also forced to work from home, and while I’ve seen varying levels of expectations from employers, the general consensus is that work should continue unhindered.
My daughter is 6 years old and in a pretty demanding Kinder program. It took her school a few weeks of scrambling to figure out the whole Zoom thing, so we signed her up to a STEM program called “ASTEME” (wonderful by the way!). A few weeks into her online STEM program, her school finally added their own morning classes with her own teachers. On top of those she also has Zoom sessions for Martial Arts and Piano lessons.
Suddenly my daughter has a packed week! And in a way, it feels more packed than her non-Pandemic school week.
What’s a parent to do?
Each one of her programs had their own schedule for the week, published in the form of a Google Doc, or sent via emails, with links to Zoom conferences. We found ourselves making our own weekly schedule to manage conflicts, printed it out and stuck it on the wall.
But kids being kids, I found myself scrambling between my own makeshift standing work desk, to her laptop, so I can launch all of her Zoom meetings on time.
I thought to myself: “Ok, there has to be a better solution! We’re a bunch of engineers and solution architects, so let’s come up with something”.
And this is how Nag.Today was born. I didn’t want to keep nagging my daughter, and I didn’t want to have to keep launching Zoom sessions for her, so I decided the ideal product will do this:
- It should announce upcoming sessions 1 to 5 minutes before they start (with a pleasant human voice): “Biology class starts in 5 minutes”.
- When the session starts, it should:
- Announce: “Biology class is now starting”
- Launch Zoom automatically into the correct session
- Indicate in my calendar that Zoom has launched
- Optional: It should automatically print all PDF attachments, a couple of minutes before the session starts.
Overall architecture
Here’s a simple diagram we prepared that explains the flow:
Feedback needed
We expect the extension will hit the Google Chrome Extensions store in a week or less. What we need now is testing & feedback. So please, if you’re a parent and you think this extension can help you, please give it a try and let us know how it works for you!