Prizes for downloading the app shouted over announcements, constant reminders for students to get on board, and a $13,000 dollar price tag. MVHS has heard a lot about Minga, a campus management application that acts as a digital hall pass, but many misconceptions and uncertainties exist. After piloting Minga for the first semester, the school will decide whether to keep the app on campus based on the feedback received.
“Minga is designed to help know where students are and gives students opportunities to know where events are happening on campus,” Assistant Principal Heather Morelli said in an interview last school year.
One of the central reasons the administration has implemented Minga is to better monitor students’ Tutorial attendance. A 53-minute period on Wednesdays and Fridays, Tutorial gives students the opportunity to go to any of their teachers’ classes to receive academic support or retake tests. Morelli said that while some students use the Tutorial period to receive academic support and retake assessments, others use it as a time to relax with their friends or as free time.
Morelli said that utilizing Minga for Tutorial attendance is “level one” of its implementation. Once teachers get more comfortable with the application, administration will begin to use more of Minga’s resources and features.
“Level two would be using [Minga] for all of our passes,” Morelli said. “We would move away from having paper passes and they would all be digital, either on [a student’s] phone or laptop.”
Health and positive psychology teacher Heather Boyle has only used Minga for Tutorial this school year, but said she has seen other teachers using the app to monitor students going to other campus locations during class, such as the Spartan Spot and counseling offices.
Boyle said that getting used to the new Tutorial check-in system took time and came with its fair share of problems including trouble logging in and navigating the application. But after smoothening out the bumps, Boyle said she began to see the positives of using Minga.
“From the teacher perspective, it’s pretty intuitive,” Boyle said. “It has a lot of additional features that our old system didn’t have.”
The old system that Boyle compared Minga to is TeachMore’s FlexTime. It solely consisted of scanning students’ physical ID cards as a way of tracking attendance for Tutorial, making it much faster and easier to check students into Tutorial. According to Morelli, FlexTime cost the school $7,000, and Minga costs $13,000.
“[The new system] has the extra steps where all students have to [pre-register], but hopefully students will be more thoughtful about where they need to go,” Boyle said. “[Students] can plan for productive use of the time instead of just popping in last minute.”
Although Boyle said the old system was easier for both students and teachers because only ID cards and numbers were required for Tutorial sign-up, she said that her students quickly adapted to the new registration process and she has confidence in Minga going forward.
Minga also allows students to access other campus services, such as the Tutorial Center, Spartan Spot, and free periods — giving teachers and administrators peace of mind that students are both satisfied and safe, Boyle said.
“[Minga] allows us to provide services to our students and also have a trust level with them,” Boyle said. “We know where people are when we need to find them.”
Although some teachers have quickly adapted to Minga, some students have had a hard time adjusting to the new system. Senior Theo Mueller has been using the app to sign into Tutorials this school year, and believes that Minga doesn’t necessarily solve issues or benefit students because it only adds to the hassle.
“My first impression was that [the school is] trying to solve something that can’t be solved,” Mueller said. “I think it’s useless.”
Mueller said that fellow students share similar sentiments regarding Minga, feeling that the app adds no real benefit to the school.
“The common consensus that I am getting from fellow students is that it is a hindrance … especially when it comes to signing in for Tutorial,” Mueller said. “Scanning [student ID] cards was easier.”
Despite the negative feelings towards the new system, Mueller firmly believes in the importance of student attendance and that everyone should get some form of education. He said the way in which the education is received matters, and it does not start with Minga.
“If [students] don’t want to take advantage of the schooling system then that’s their choice,” Mueller said. “Perhaps instead of trying to keep people in, make school a place where people want to be.”
