An app to kill your procrastination!

 An iOS app developed by twelfth grader Pranav Thandu schedules lessons automatically between football and movies,  finds Daniel Thimmayya
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For the average school-goer, the most effective ‘study alarm’ is the sound of their mother’s voice. Twelfth grader Pranav Thandu didn’t quite need that. Not only was he very organised and good at his studies, but his mother wasn’t one for yelling either.
So when all his classmates at Chennai’s MCTM Chidambaram Chettyar International School gingerly asked him for the secret behind his great grades, it got him thinking. “I noticed that a lot of them just kept putting off studying and ended up not getting it done,” explained the 16-year-old, “So I decided to create an app that would take into account all of the things that they had in life — movies, sport, practice, classes, school — and schedule specific lessons during time slots, and remind them,” he added.

Pranav Thandu | Pic: Ashwin Prasath
Pranav Thandu | Pic: Ashwin Prasath

Called StudyMate, the app has been live on the Apple Store since the end of August and has been downloaded a shade over 1000 times. The app creates a personalised schedule for every student. “What StudyMate does is it takes information from the Apple calendar, which gets notifications from all the other apps. It also asks you what lessons specifically you want to learn, whether it’s a specific chapter in Chemistry or something in Maths, gets you to commit to a duration and then slots it in. Fifteen minutes before you’re supposed to start studying, the alarm will start to go off,” he said with a smile, adding, “It’s kind of hard to ignore, really.”

Incidentally, this isn’t Pranav’s first tryst with developing iOS apps. “You’re not going to believe this, but the first app I created was a news app. I submitted it to the app store but they shot it down,” he said. “It was heart-breaking!” He then did a fun app a couple of years on called Dodgeball before graduating to StudyMate. After he completed the app and field tested it, he decided it was time to let his friends know about his creation, “I told quite a few of my classmates about it and they were pretty excited. A lot of them downloaded it and said that it really helped with their study load,” he said, contentment writ large on his face. And his teachers, what did they say? “Truth is I didn’t want to tell them,” he added, a hint of embarrassment creeping onto his visage, “They would have made a big deal of it and called me forward in the assembly and all, so....,” he trailed off.
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