Hewlett High School sophomore creates Just Service app

Michael Green to conduct coding workshops at H-W Public Library

Posted

The horror a student feels when looking into the backpack, only to find that the homework, worksheet or permission slip that they are looking for is nowhere to be found, could be a thing of the past.

Michael Green, a sophomore at Hewlett High School, has created an app, Just Service, to help students have one less thing to lose. The app offers students a place to keep track of community service hours. After losing the paper with his recorded hours, Green set out to save other students from the same fate.

“I realized that other people must have had the same problem, the app keeps it neat,” he said. “With the app students can easily keep track of their hours, print their sheets out from their phones or turn it into a PDF file and share it directly with their teachers.”

Hewlett-Woodmere schools requires students to print out their community service hour sheets, but after meeting with the administration, Green hopes that Just Service could be the school’s standard by the time he’s a senior. All the data is backed up on a Google database, so users can recover everything even after losing their phone, he said.

Green said that he has more than 600 users, most are in New York, with some as far away as California, and even a few in Canada. Liam Kaminsky, also a sophomore at Hewlett High, likes it much better than the traditional written document.

“Last year I did my community service on paper and it was terrible,” he said. “I am a pretty messy person and when I completed my hours I lost the paper, and when I found it, it was ripped up and nasty… I plan to use [the app] as soon as it’s certified by the school.”

Just Service is the second app that Green has created; his first exposure to coding came in a class taught by Robert Machado last school year. Since he’s taken courses at Hofstra University and online at Code Academy, Machado said be believes that Green has a knack for programming. “I do feel that Mike does have a talent for coding and if he chooses to pursue a career in IT, he will be very successful,” Machado said.

The Hewlett-Woodmere library’s Parent Advisory Board suggested finding a high school volunteer to teach coding. Green contacted the board and offered his expertise. “We’ve been very interested in offering more coding programs at the library,” said Caroline Lynch, the teen librarian. “Coding has become so prevalent in our world today and it’s so important that members of our society, in this generation and upcoming generations, are proficient in different coding languages.”

While Green will be leading the workshop over spring break, the library plans to continue similar courses with their staff to teach younger kids basic coding. Perhaps one of them will design an app to replace paper homework.

Open to students from fifth to 12th grade, Green’s coding workshop will be held on April 2 and 4 at 6 p.m. Sign up is in person or by telephone. The library is at 1125 Broadway in Hewlett. Call (516) 374-1967.