I’ve been gone from the blog for a while. For years I’ve cycled through a process of setting a blog up, writing a few posts, and then abandoning it for years. Oops, I did it again… For posterity I’m leaving the old posts up this time. As a reminder to myself.
I’ve been working for about a year on a pretty awesome project EdScreening. It’s a SAAS to help parents and teachers better understand neurodivergent children. I’m sure it will come up a lot as it goes through different stages, but for a super quick intro…
Why EdScreening?
A friend approached me with an idea. Her daughter was having problems at school. She had seen a heap of specialists, but no one was able to tell her what was going on. Eventually she found an expert on 2e (twice exceptional) kids, who did a screening on multiple fronts to spot any neurodivergent aspects the daughter was showing. To cut a long story short, her daughter radically improved at, and started enjoying, school.
We talked about making this approach more broadly accessible so other people would have access. We could try to make it a business, while doing something with a potential to help millions of kids. Count me in!
Where’s it at?
My first iteration used NextJS. It’s a great framework, but the whole serverless thing was wrong way on a few fronts – most strongly with authentication and access issues. But it was suitable for the MVP.
We got it though doing pilot educational screenings OK. We will soon have enough pilot samples thorough, which then go through our academic advisors for validation and calibration.
I was planning on a major update of the NextJS app between the pilot stage and the actual launch, but I changed my mind, and swapped the whole thing over run on Rails / Heroku. I’m so much happier working on it now. I should have just started on Rails initially, but I wanted to play with a new hotness…
Where’s it going?
After the pilot is complete, and analysis done, we will have enough data to generate reports. The report is being designed by Erin at Workshop (who is lovely and a total pleasure to work with). Once the report is ready I’ll update the site and send people who did the pilot screening links so they can do full screening. After that, we launch. I can’t wait!