About
Yob was a project started by Tanner Nielsen and Jordan Hendrickson in the spring of 2014 when we were in high school. It was motivated by our appreciation for the teacher of our physics class, as well as the dislike for the graphing software he had us use.
Development
When Yob began, we were developing in Java and our plans for the software were much too ambitious: We wanted not only to build a better graphing application, but also a complete assignment management platform through which the teacher could distribute their assignments and the students could complete them. We weren't experienced developers, but we managed to hack together an account system and beginnings of an assignment editor over the summer. The old login screen looked like this:
To our surprise, the school decided to replace all of their laptops with Chromebooks when the next fall came around, which Java applications were not easily compatible with. Moreover, all of the teachers had started using Google Classroom, which made our software largely irrelevant.
This was a huge setback for us and we nearly gave up, but we decided to start over and build our app with JavaScript, an entirely new language to us at the time. We also chose to scale back and focus on making a graphing application in the form of a Google Docs Add-on to complement Google Classroom.
It was this decision and a few years of development that got the project to where it is today. If you're interested to learn a little more about Yob's development, a poster was made detailing more of our development process.
Acknowledgements
We owe a great debt of gratitude to Mr. Dean Roush, the Physics teacher at Luck High School, for helping us test and shape the software. This project would have never gotten off the ground without his patience and trust, would have never progressed so far without his willingness to test our software as it developed.