Course deadlines app

Courses have deadlines. Oftentimes it happens that the deadline comes and the student work is not ready. Even though the deadlines are clearly communicated, often in several places in course materials and website. There may be many reasons for missing a deadline, but whatever the reason, missing one usually leads in to problems in passing the course.

Missing a deadline also causes extra work. Questions are asked, replies sent, and if there is a really good or valid reason, there may be an exception to the rule and extension to the deadline is granted. But if this happens often, in a course of hundreds of students, all this is extra work burdening and stressing both the teachers and the students.

If everybody gets an extension to the deadline, time after time, the concept of deadline becomes irrelevant. If one student gets an extension to the deadline, all others with the same reasons should also get it, since students must be treated equally. Therefore, it would be really, really nice if everybody would acknowledge the deadlines and schedule their work so that no deadlines are missed. A useful habit or skill to have also later in working life…

To make sure a deadlines are not missed since “I forgot it” or “It came sooner than I expected”, I started to remind students of one course about the forthcoming deadlines on my weekly Monday lecture. Since apps are cool, and I like to tinker with things, I wrote an app for this. Obviously, I could have just shown the list of deadlines from the course materials, slideshow or website, but that is boring. Also the app is yet another example of how to implement things, a demo that I can use in various programming courses and a topic for a blog post 🤓

Presenting the Course Deadline Counter app:

The app is localized to English and Finnish, above you can see the Finnish localization screenshot, in GitHub readme, you can see the English locale version screenshots.

Each deadline has graphics and formatting to convey something about the deadline:

• A symbol (trying) to convey the type of the deadline, an exam (notepad) or a programming task (hammer).
• Deadlines that are “strict” (dealbreakers; will lead to failing the course if missed, others may be more flexible) are shown with an orange warning sign.
• Deadlines already passed are shown in gray, and
• deadlines coming soon (are “hot”) are highlighted in red.

See the GitHub readme document for examples of these. The app is actually better than a static list of text in web or slideshow in that it will dynamically format the deadlines, as listed above and shown in the GitHub readme.

The deadlines are stored, for each course, in a separate JSON file in the Documents/CourseDeadlines directory on the user’s Mac:

func store() throws {
	let storagePath = URL.documentsDirectory.appending(component: Deadlines.appDocumentDirectory, directoryHint: .isDirectory)
	deadlines.sort()
	let fileManager = FileManager.default
	let encoder = JSONEncoder()
	encoder.outputFormatting = [.prettyPrinted, .sortedKeys]
	let data = try encoder.encode(self)
	let filePath = storagePath.appending(path: name + ".json").path(percentEncoded: false)
	print("Storing file \(filePath)")
	if !fileManager.createFile(atPath: filePath, contents: data) {
		throw DeadlineErrors.fileSaveError
	}
}

The design decision here was to make it easy to share the course deadlines — just send the JSON file to anyone with this app. Or another app anyone perhaps chooses to implement that is able to read the JSON file.

With the app, user can add end edit new courses, add and edit deadlines, and also delete deadlines and courses. Although the app was originally developed for a teacher (me), it could obviously be used also by students to manage the deadlines for the courses she takes.

I did present the deadlines with one course, weekly, using this app last Fall in the live lectures. I also sent a weekly newsletter in the course Moodle space and included a screenshot of the current deadline situation in the message.

I didn’t gather any data on the impact of the app. Did students actually miss the deadlines like in any other course? Cannot say. My main motivation was to make sure no one misses the deadlines because of not being aware of them. Hopefully the awareness of deadlines was improved, and there wasn’t (too much) annoyance in being repeatedly reminded of them, time and time again 😂

There are some Apple/Mac specific things in the JSON, an example of a course with four deadlines:

{
  "deadlines" : [
    {
      "becomesHotDaysBefore" : 7,
      "date" : 764027972.579756,
      "goal" : "Form pairs for course work",
      "isDealBreaker" : false,
      "symbol" : "person.2",
      "uuid" : "179C5A8D-2E3B-4000-A3F8-F821E98CDCAC"
    },
    {
      "becomesHotDaysBefore" : 7,
      "date" : 765464432.579756,
      "goal" : "GUI design finished",
      "isDealBreaker" : true,
      "symbol" : "document.on.clipboard",
      "uuid" : "E3A7AF6F-9322-4D6A-994C-346D5F1B6F43"
    },
    {
      "becomesHotDaysBefore" : 7,
      "date" : 767883632.579756,
      "goal" : "Learning tasks done",
      "isDealBreaker" : false,
      "symbol" : "checkmark.seal.fill",
      "uuid" : "DB7A7330-1CBD-4785-8FDD-AB5B5F35A596"
    },
    {
      "becomesHotDaysBefore" : 7,
      "date" : 768488432.579756,
      "goal" : "Implementation done",
      "isDealBreaker" : true,
      "symbol" : "hammer",
      "uuid" : "1AD3DBD3-4121-40EA-9C4D-368A10765999"
    }
  ],
  "name" : "Ohjelmointi 4",
  "startDate" : 763401692.579756,
  "uuid" : "33DCF108-1FAD-4DE7-9C6E-A9DC02073043"
}

The deadline date is not milliseconds from 1970 as integer (perhaps more common), but as double. The symbol for the deadline is a name for Apple SF Symbol. If implementing an app for other platforms to show the same JSON data, the developer needs to figure out a way to show something as the symbol (or ignore it). Maybe a custom drawn image or something.

I list some future improvement ideas in the GitHub readme, but don’t actually know if I am going to implement those. The app already fulfills the intended purpose, so anything else would be just something fun to implement, if I have the time or motivation to do them. One thing not listed in the readme is to provide the app also for iPhone/iPad, but since the original idea as a teacher tool used in lectures, did this only as a Mac app.

If you have any use for an app like that, or just want to use it for learning Swift/SwiftUI, the app is open sourced so just take it and use it.