I graduate from Georgia Tech next week, so I thought now would be a great time to revist one of the first projects I worked on as a student here.
T-Square
When I started at Tech back in 2015, we used an online learning management system called T-Square. It was the platform we used for all of our courses, and it included things like our assignments, grades, resources, and instructor announcements. T-Square was built in the early-2000s, and it looks the part. The mobile site is a particularly bad offender, with no visual styling to speak of. After dealing with it for my first two weeks of class, I decided I wanted to try and do something about it.
Creating T-Squared
I spent the majority of my first semester working on T-Squared, a native iOS client for the T-Square platform.
T-Square doesn’t have an official API, so T-Squared fetched all of its content by scraping the platform’s mobile site. The app included all of the important information you’d expect — assignments, resources, and grades for all of your classes — but I also got to build some interesting features that didn’t exist on T-Square itself. One of its biggest killer features was that it would calculate your total grade in a class (T-Square didn’t do that for some reason, even though it had all of the data on-hand). It also let you add grade predictions so you could see how they would affect your overall course grade (a “what if” calculator).
Over the course of its lifetime, T-Square was downloaded over 12,000 times and used by students over 2,000,000 times! Back when it was in its prime, it wasn’t uncommon to see people using it a few rows up in big lecture halls.
Phasing Out T-Square
But T-Square was evantually replaced with a new system called Canvas, and it was phased out completely after the Fall 2018 semester. I finally got around to de-listing T-Squared while I was writing this post (April 2019). It was a very important part of my early college life, so I’m definitely sad to see it go. Thanks for the memories!
