🤖 Finding the Right Tool: How I Built a Duty Roster App in Just 30 Minutes

Friday, August 07, 2026


As 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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