PreMatch is a site that allows students at Andover High School to quickly and easily enter their schedules, and find out which of their friends are in which of their classes or lunches. Since its first launch on August 22nd, 2018, it has expanded to include a Discord bot and a mobile app that comes bundled with a widget that gives any student quick access to their schedule. The widget looks like so:
Behold - the 7+H schedule system of Andover High School:
It’s a chaotic 8-day rotation of 8 different blocks that vary in length combined with 4 lunch periods. One of these blocks is the H block, a block used for student enrichment, in which you can visit your teachers arbitrarily. When schedules are released one week before school starts, nearly every student at Andover High School goes in a frenzy, sending their schedule to everyone they know in order to see which of their friends are in which of their classes. This is a frantic, inefficient process that is never completely accurate and takes a long time.
When we, the creators of PreMatch, noticed how many students shared their schedules and the many platforms they used to share them, we decided that we had to make something that would make this process easier and more efficient, while still keeping sensitive information away from the prying eyes of the general public. Thus, PreMatch was born.
To use PreMatch, all you need to do is visit prematch.org, and log in with your school-assigned Google account.
Next, fill in your schedule by searching for your teachers. If you would like to, you may also add in your lunch period numbers for blocks C through G.
That's it! You can now view your classes and your classmates!
During the creation of PreMatch, security was always one of our top concerns. We wanted to make sure that only students could access the site, and nobody else. To do this, we implemented a Google sign-in integration, which requires you to be logged into a valid k12.andoverma.us Google account. Without being logged into an account, all you can see is the Home and About pages. In addition, we have implemented an "invisible" setting, allowing students to only make themselves visible to their classmates, meaning that they will not show up in searches, and their own schedule will be hidden to everyone but themselves. However, they will still be visible to their classmates, but only in their shared classes. For example, if Student A and Student B share a C block class, and Student B has marked themselves as invisible, Student A will be able to see that Student B is in their C block class, but they will not be able to see any other part of their schedule.
PreMatch was made by Michael Peng and Daniel Ivanovich, in the summer before their sophomore year. The site uses the Bulma framework and our backend is written in Flask. The Discord Bot was programmed in Ruby using discordrb, and the iOS app was made using Xcode. The site is hosted on Google's App Engine, the database is hosted on Google's Cloud Datastore, and the Discord bot is run on Google's Compute Engine.