# Branch

A smart school prototype that made a classroom safer in an emergency and easier to run day to day. We presented it at Oracle OpenWorld 2019.

- Dates: 2019
- Status: Archived
- Page: https://jlawrence.io/projects/branch

## Highlights

- Presented at Oracle OpenWorld 2019

## Why we built it

Branch was a smart school. The idea was that a classroom should be safer in an emergency and take less fiddling the rest of the day. I built it with a teammate for Oracle OpenWorld 2019, with help from the Oracle Education Foundation.

## What we built

There were two parts. One was a scaled-down model of a classroom with a door lock, blinds, lights and a projector, which took long nights over the summer to build. The other was a website for teachers and school administrators that controlled it. The two of us worked on both.

![A teacher's controls for the door, temperature and lights. This is the 2019 code running locally with sample data and no classroom attached.](https://jlawrence.io/stories/branch/classroom-controls.webp)

A teacher could lock the door, set the temperature, dim the lights or change their color, and open the blinds. They could ring the bell or type a message for the room's speaker to read out.

Starting a lockdown locked the door, turned off the lights and closed the blinds. Every teacher who was signed in was sent to the same screen, with a running timer and a chat to pass updates, and ending it took a password.

![The screen every teacher sees during a lockdown, with a timer, updates and a chat (sample data).](https://jlawrence.io/stories/branch/lockdown.webp)

## How it went

We presented it at Oracle OpenWorld 2019. It was my second time presenting there as a student.