Revolutionizing Scheduling: Building Efficiency from Code to Calendar

In the world today, there are countless ways for us to create and manage our schedules. Everything from the Apple Calendar to a pen-and-paper schedule can help us manage our time. What happens when you must manage not only your time, but a schedule for more than 20 part-time student techs?

In the past four years, Drake University's Information Technology Services department has implemented several technologies in efforts to adequately manage scheduling part-time student techs at the Support Center. Several notable technologies are Microsoft Shifts, Microsoft Bookings, and 7Shifts, and most recently scheduling has been managed with Microsoft Excel. We realized that these technologies were not configurable to our specific needs. In our search for a viable alternative, we realized that there was one resource we had left largely unutilized: our student techs.

Many of our student techs are majoring in computer science, artificial intelligence, or similar fields of study. Surely some of them would be interested in modernizing our scheduling practices while strengthening their coding skills. Through the investigation of these possibilities, we decided that an efficient solution would involve creating a scheduling web application. The technology relied upon for this development includes but is not limited to JavaScript, React.js, SQL Server, and C#.

In this paper, four part-time student techs will show how they have taken on this challenge, and plan to design, develop, and eventually deploy a scheduling web application for their workplace. Through the initial stages of application development, we hope to share our insights as we initiate this project.