Young entrepreneur on a mission to replace paper student planners in education
Launched in 2011, My Study Life is a cross-platform planner app "for students designed by students". The app works for anyone in education and is a modern solution to student planning in a digital age.
My Study Life allows students to organise their classes, tasks and exams in a simple and easy way. It now has over 725,000 registered users worldwide and is a free app that is completely ad-free.
The idea for the app came in 2010. When most sixth form students were seeing friends and working towards their A Levels, Fleet-based Jamie Clarke had bigger plans for his time. By the age of 16 he had developed a fascination with technology - progressing to an interest in software development.
Fuelled by his frustration with paper planners and his school's virtual learning environment (VLE), he decided to create one app to organise his classes, homework and exams.
Clarke said: "At secondary school we had a VLE that didn't seem to cater for anything the students wanted or needed and my sixth form had numerous intranets that didn't work on phones. Following the release of Windows Phone in 2010 I decided to develop an app that replaced my paper planner - but from a student's point of view."
Alongside his AS Levels, Clarke gained valuable experience during an apprenticeship as a .NET developer through QA - the UK learning company. In his spare time, Clarke also used Microsoft resources and his own knowledge to develop the app from scratch.
Clarke has moved on from working in the small hours before sixth form and now has a small team of investors behind him. The app has also gained support from professor Steve Molyneux, CEO of The Tablet Academy, and a respected expert in the use of digital technologies to support education.
Looking to the future, Clarke said: "My ambition is for My Study Life to become synonymous with technology in education and the de facto standard for timetabling and managing homework, replacing the paper planner in the process."
The next step for My Study Life is a Seedrs crowdfunding campaign, to raise money for the expansion of the app.