Annabel Zaterka ‘26
Lion Link in Dark Mode
Lion Link is a new app developed by St. Markers of the Advanced Topics: Project Management and Development class. In 2022, four computer science students, Tiffany Ahn '24, Ian Choe '25, James Sabet '24, and Tyler Scaringella '24, came together with the idea of designing a communication platform that would increase the overall efficiency of navigating life at St. Mark's. This is no small feat at a school where information is currently relayed through multiple platforms, including Gmail, Google Docs, Google Slides, Google Sheets, and more. "We noticed a large amount of all-school emails and information scattered throughout various platforms," says Tyler. "We wanted to use our programming knowledge to attempt to create a solution to this. During the 2022-2023 school year, the five students in the class worked to design a website for students. However, this year, when the class grew to eight (Cooper Wang ‘25, Sunoo Jeong ‘24, Kaien Hung ‘25, Erin Rasmussen ‘24) students, they found it more efficient to design an app instead. Lion Link's goal is to be a single user-friendly location where students can find all the information they need daily.
The class used an adaptive project management approach called agile methodology to quickly scale the product and then make improvements. They are divided into teams: Frontend - IOS, Frontend - Android, and Backend. "We then went into brainstorming/prototyping through frequent scrum meetings in class," says Sunoo, followed by defining tasks, writing code, and debugging. Mr. Loranger notes that students explored a full "stack" of technology to build the application, including MySQL, Prisma, Node JS, XCode/Swift, Android Studio, Asana, Slack, and GitHub. "Most importantly, students used their communication, collaboration, and problem-solving skills on a daily basis to achieve the group goals," he says.
Currently, the app has a calendar and 009 options. The calendar feature was finished just before March Break. It contains each student's schedule, and in the future, the calendar will be expanded to include athletic schedules as well. Furthermore, the 009 feature was used by most of the student body and a few faculty members to alert game runners when they got tagged and tagged someone else and communicate current targets. The app prevented miscommunications during the game and heightened the excitement because every student had access to a real-time count of how many players were left. "It took a year to build the app itself, but the fun thing about 009 is that it only took us a week and a half to build all the features," explained Tiffany.
The app has a lot of potential for expansion. Looking ahead, Lion Link aims to expand its offerings to include additional features such as the daily lunch menu, club information, athletic information, and even a lost and found feature. Lion Link has already begun impacting the St. Mark's community, and students can not wait to see what comes next!