TJ Theater Arts. Chemistry Society. Class Council. These are just some of the groups at Jefferson using Ion’s club announcements feature. The feature was developed between the Sysadmins and the Student Principal’s Advisory Committee (SPAC) in January. The Ion Club Announcements were created to add a club specific messaging platform and required technical changes to Ion.
The Ion Club Announcements feature allows users to see messages from clubs they are subscribed to. Senior Alan Zhu, a lead Sysadmin, believes that the feature will be relevant to club officers and club members.
“We combined the announcement features with 8th period clubs,” Zhu said.
The new feature involved a significant rewrite of the previous code.
“We edited the Ion open source code and had to work around Ion’s current setup,” Zhu said.
This editing was necessary because there are a lot of specific use cases for the club announcements. Club sponsors and teacher moderators can manage club announcements, as well as student club officers. The Sysadmins anticipate that the use of the Ion announcements feature will increase rapidly.
“Having many announcements will take a long time to display carefully,” sophomore and Sysadmin, Shreyas Jain said
That is why the Ion team is filtering data queries with Structured Query Language (SQL). By optimizing how Ion receives queries, Ion can prevent itself from slowing down.
“This will allow us to get [information] faster,” Zhu said.
The Student Principal’s Advisory Committee (SPAC), led by principal Dr. Ann Bonitatibus, initiated the Ion feature project. SPAC members reached out to the Sysadmins team with ideas in January and worked together once a month throughout the spring.
“I really appreciate all the work that the Sysadmins have done to support us,” senior and SPAC member Asha Das said.
The SPAC team proceeded with the idea after noting that some students are not allowed to use social media. Thus, they wanted to provide everyone with specific announcements and information.
“I think that once the school as a whole adjusts to the feature being available it’ll be a really great asset to our school communication,” Das said.
As an officer for TJ Theater Arts, Das has helped the program kickstart the feature. Many people have subscribed and they tested an announcement on Oct. 20.
“I’m excited to potentially use the feature to announce things like tech work schedules or 8th period theater events,” Das said.
Tala Tohmeh is another SPAC member who used the feature with the Chemistry Society.
“The announcement feature is a really easy way for me and my officer team to send out lab announcements and other fun activities,” Tohmeh said.
The Sysadmins team is adding more clubs during the current beta testing phase and anticipates that the feature will be rolled out to all clubs during the second semester.
“The full release of the new feature is coming,” Zhu said.