Mustang Money

Magnolia ISD's Coach Lundin Matthews teaches web design and coding at Magnolia Junior High School. Earlier this year, he challenged his students to develop an online campus reward system that would allow administrators and teachers to add and remove dollars and students to track reward balances. Students Zack Fisher and Jacob Pendergraff answered the call, developing a new web-based program for tracking the Mustang Money campus reward system.

“Our administration challenged our classes with developing an online program which would eliminate printing cost of the Mustang Money, secure a way of tracking each student’s balance and give students access to their account,” explained Coach Matthews. “Previously, the students would turn in their Mustang Money during lunch and each student’s amount was manually entered into a spreadsheet.”

Zack and Jacob worked on the project for four weeks, creating account access for administrators, teachers, and students at each grade level. Teachers can log in and reward any student with Mustang dollars by entering the student’s ID number or first and last name. Students can log in daily to check their balance, and administrators can add new teachers and students to the system at any time.

“The most challenging part of the project was developing the code behind the search function,” said Jacob, but noted that the hard work was worth it. “It is really gratifying to see what Zack and I have worked so hard on the past month actually works and the campus is using the system.”

Coach Matthews continues to help and encourage his students as they research and develop the web-based program to make it scalable for other campuses in Magnolia ISD: “We are excited to see what is next from these students.” #IAmTXEd  Magnolia Independent School District