We all know Staples High School students can sometimes struggle with organization and are constantly dependent on the use of technology to assist them throughout their daily lives and routines. That’s why Saturn – Time Together, a mobile app created by Dylan Diamond ’17, a Staples alumni, is widely downloaded throughout the student body in order to help students keep track of their schedules and see what class a friend may be in at any given time throughout the school day.
However, many of Saturn’s crucial functions, including showing what times classes begin and end, what lunch period a student has and what the connections schedule may be on any particular day, have each been experiencing technical difficulties throughout the school year. I, for one, have gotten incredibly confused by the misleading notifications the app has sent to my phone during passing periods, complicating our already hectic school lives to a larger extent.
Despite the amount of features that Saturn may have, it is clear that many of them do not efficiently work, and there are not many options to implement school-selective programs, such as the lack of lab lunch or selecting your teacher and specific group for your connections period. Ever since I downloaded the app when I first arrived at Staples, I have always wondered why the app won’t implement these important features. The app is also prone to a lot of false information – showing certain holidays as days that students are in the building, displaying communication time when most teachers don’t observe it and getting your lunch period wrong on any day even after you manually put it into the app.
New user interface updates to the app throughout the summer months may be an explanation for the chaos that has occurred. Over the 11 week school recess, Saturn had major edits to the overall layout and design of the app, as well as addressing many privacy concerns that school boards and parental organizations, such as Protect Young Eyes have advocated against. The groups spread awareness about the possibility of an outside threat gaining access to students’ school schedules and using it to their advantage in order to stalk or hurt a student.
The lack of efficiency of Saturn’s core features had not been seen prior to these edits to such a large extent, potentially due to the accidental creation of errors in the code of the app. Regardless of what the cause may be, it is a big issue for myself and students alike.
Considering Staples High School is one of the most rigorous high schools in the state, the school days and our personal lives are incredibly stressful. The false directions given by Saturn to us offers even more stress from a tool that is supposed to help us navigate hectic schedules. These issues are especially infuriating considering it is quite early in the year, and it is still hard to navigate our new schedules on our own without assistance from the app.
