🤖 Finding the Right Tool: How I Built a Duty Roster App in Just 30 Minutes
Friday, August 07, 2026As teachers, we often use technology to solve problems in our classrooms. 💡 However, sometimes the most useful solutions are for the responsibilities we have outside school as well.
Every Saturday, I attend my weekly religious class, where I serve as the assistant monitor. One of my responsibilities is to prepare the weekly cleaning duty roster. 🧹
With 50 members in the class, assigning five people each week sounds simple, but it wasn't.
I wanted the process to be fair. ⚖️ Members who had cleaned fewer times should be given priority, while those who had recently been on duty should wait for their next turn. I also needed to exclude anyone absent that Saturday morning.
At first, I explored one platform that seemed capable of handling the task. 💻 I spent hours trying to build the app, adjusting settings, and figuring out how to make the system work. The more I worked on it, the more complicated it became. Instead of solving my problem, I found myself trying to understand the tool.
That made me stop and ask myself:
🤔 Am I choosing the right tool, or am I forcing the wrong tool to solve my problem?
The answer became clear.
Since I had previously built my Music Room Booking App using Google AI Studio, I decided to use a tool I was already familiar with. 🚀
This time, I didn't start by writing code.
Instead, I spent time defining exactly what I wanted the app to do. ✍️
The app only needed to:
✅ Allow me to mark only the absent members.
✅ Automatically select five members for cleaning duty based on fairness.
✅ Keep a record of previous duty assignments.
✅ Display each member's total duties and last duty date.
Nothing more.
With a clear workflow and a focused prompt, I completed the entire application in about 30 minutes. ⏱️
The experience reminded me of an important lesson.
💙 The best technology isn't always the one with the most features. It's the one that helps you solve your problem simply and effectively.
Another lesson I learned is that AI performs much better when we first define the workflow clearly. 🧩 Once I knew exactly what I wanted the app to do, Google AI Studio transformed those ideas into a working application surprisingly quickly.
The app is still waiting for its first real test. 🧪 I will be using it during one of our upcoming Saturday sessions, and I'm looking forward to seeing how it performs in a real-life situation. I hope it works exactly as intended and makes the duty selection process quicker, fairer, and more transparent for everyone involved. 🤲
Whether everything goes perfectly or there are improvements to make, this project has already reminded me that solving a problem starts with understanding the problem first. Choosing the right tool and keeping the solution simple can make all the difference.
✨ Sometimes, the best innovation isn't about creating something extraordinary. It's about finding a simple solution to an everyday problem.


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