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SMART amp frees students and teachers to collaborate, with help from Google App Engine
Wednesday, July 9, 2014
Today’s guest blog comes from David LaBine, director of education software for
SMART Technologies
. SMART Technologies creates interactive displays that encourage collaboration in business and education. The company recently launched
SMART amp
, a cloud-based collaborative learning tool for classrooms.
At SMART Technologies, we don’t want to just build a product and then close up the development shop. We want to keep making it better and add in new features without getting sidetracked by development chores like creating virtual machines. Google App Engine is giving us the freedom to build our SMART amp classroom software on a faster, more flexible timeline – which helps students to learn better and teachers to teach more effectively.
We’re pioneers in the interactive displays market, and we introduced the first interactive whiteboard way back in 1991. SMART amp, our newest product for education, is a logical progression in our line of collaborative products for workplaces and schools. It’s a cloud-based tool that allows teachers and students to connect using any mobile device and bring together all kinds of content in a collaborative workspace. To keep things organized, SMART amp lets teachers manage workflows, passing control of the workspace to different students or groups so that everyone gets involved. Teachers can even embed assessments in their workspaces to gauge student progress.
Before we began building SMART amp, we knew we needed a continuous deployment pipeline between our testing and production environments. App Engine allowed us to get started with continuous deployment quickly without having to build virtual machines or configuring infrastructure. Furthermore, we’ve noticed a tendency to over provision when using virtual machine setups, which means you end up developing more infrastructure than you need to get the job done – and paying more than you need to.
When we checked out various development platforms, we found that App Engine gave us the continuous development and cost savings we needed. Whenever a developer writes a piece of code, it automatically runs through a gauntlet of progressively more rigorous tests – from simple unit tests to expansive integration tests involving all of the services in the product. If the tests pass, the code goes directly to production. As a result, developers are more productive because they’re able to focus on writing new features rather than worrying about infrastructure, and they have a quick feedback loop when something unexpectedly breaks.
We’ve also saved time and have thrilled customers by integrating SMART amp with other important Google products like Google Drive and Google Apps for Education. These services make it so we can leverage millions of user identities and associated file storage already provisioned and in use by schools, greatly decreasing the time to get started with our product. The best part is that our GCP Technical Account Manager (TAM) has been a one-stop shop for all our support needs for other Google products. For example, when we had to work through some difficult Google Drive API use cases, our TAM was able to work internally to find a resolution even though the APIs weren’t explicitly covered by a support agreement or SLA.
Scaling as needed is also helping us manage costs and avoid the over provisioning problem. We can expand our use of App Engine when we have large amounts of traffic, but we can also manage our usage so that it matches the load on the applications, which cuts our costs by 23%.
When we see the results of our development projects in classrooms using SMART amp, it makes the hard work we’ve done to build this product all worthwhile. One of the first lessons our initial users created was on globalization. It was inspiring to watch students start talking to each other and get creative, pulling in news stories, pictures and maps into lessons about the diamond trade and oil production. App Engine plays a big role in making us enjoy coming to work every day.
-Posted by David LaBine, Director of education software for SMART Technologies
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