PORTLAND, Ore. — A former Roosevelt High School student has found a solution to a problem students and families deal with nationwide.

Often times, families struggle to keep up with all the information and notes provided by their school district. But several years ago, Terren Gurule developed an app called Trivory for students and families to keep up to date on things like courses, extracurricular activities, and what time their bus would arrive. 

“So, it really makes sense for a school to meet students where they are, on smartphones,” Gurule said.

At the time, Gurule was a high school freshman. The idea was to keep all pertinent information in one place, thereby making it easier to track.

“I’ve been working on Trivory for about five years now,” Gurule said.

Gurule unveiled the app to his peers after around a year of coding. It quickly became a fixture.

“Shortly after launching the app at Roosevelt, I began to hear from other schools who were interested in using the app as well,” Gurule said. 

Now 95% of students at Portland Public’s nine main high schools are active users. Some Portland Public middle schools have also started using the app, Gurule said. A little over a year after Gurule began working on the idea during a computer science class at Roosevelt, his app was suddenly serving thousands of students and families. 

“It felt ambitious but doable,” Aram Ansell, Gurule’s computer science teacher at Roosevelt, said.

Now, Gurule hopes to expand Trivory to schools across the country. He is close to graduating from Carnegie Mellon with a degree in human computer interaction, and plans to focus his attention on expanding the app.

“He’s someone capable of solving really big world problems,” Ansell said.

After seeing Gurule’s success, Ansell has incorporated a new class for students into his curriculum, designed to teach high schoolers how to code and develop apps.