Homeschool Haven

As a homeschool mother of four, one of the hardest parts of homeschooling is the logistical need to track hours by subject, day, and school year. This tracker aims to help relieve this stressor!

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Inspiration

The inspiration for this project comes from my personal experience as a homeschool mom of four kids. When we moved to Missouri last year, we learned that they have much more stringent rules surrounding keeping track of hours, and I wanted to create a better way to organize myself and help other homeschool parents out, especially with the influx of new homeschoolers due to the pandemic.

What it does

Homeschool Haven is a web-based program that allows you to track your students, their subjects, and the hours they have put into studying. There is also a section to organize current assignments and projects, as well as plan for future ones. There is even a calendar to keep track of important dates and plan out your teaching schedule. It's a one-stop shop for organizing homeschool life.

How I built it

I began with some starter code from pixelwibes and spent my day re-writing large parts to fit my needs. The website uses Bootstrap 5x, HTML, SCSS, javascript, and jQuery plugins. I used VSClode and Live Preview to check out all the writes and edits as I made them, and pushed early and often to GitHub. I used domain.com for the homeschoolhaven.tech URL and deployed using Vercel.

Challenges I ran into

This is my first project using Grunt, Sass, Jshint, and Sprite, and I ran into some trouble using npm to install the dependencies properly. I was using a school computer and had to switch to my older personal computer since I couldn't install anything on the school one. Then, I ran into more issues with getting the deployment to work properly as I didn't put the index.html file in the right place. I am only 7 weeks into my web dev BootCamp and haven't learned front-end yet, so this was all a journey of experimentation and lots of research on StackOverflow, github, and grunt docs!

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

I'm sure proud of sticking with it and getting something that shows well. The concept is super useful and I'm happy I was able to bring what I imagined to life! I've never seen another homeschool logger out there that doesn't look like it's out of the 90's :p

What I learned

Frameworks and dependencies probably take more than a few hours to learn, and expecting a website with so much functionality to be up and running smoothly in a matter of hours is probably not so realistic! I also learned even though I usually work in teams with coding, this being my first time working alone, I really was able to get a ton done! I didn't have to run ideas by anybody and I brought my vision to life just the way I wanted. This obviously won't work on 99% of projects, but it's fun to have a solo one every blue moon. I honestly wasn't sure if I was going to even submit anything until Friday evening when I decided just to go for it, and I'm thrilled with how much progress I was able to make in 24 hours!

What's next for Homeschool Haven

I want to get this website going with more functionality soon! I'd love to be able to utilize it here on my own personal computer and spread word around homeschool communities. There is a lot of functionality left to implement, as I'd like to be able to input amounts of hours needed at the beginning of the school year and have it show how many are left to complete, as well as the ability to create reports to file away for legal reasons.

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