This is an excerpt from a story printed in the Fall/Winter 2025 issue of Harker Magazine. Read the full story in the digital version of the magazine on Harker’s issuu page, and watch for the print version to arrive during the winter break.

Once upon a time, there was an app that didn’t work.

Unfortunately, it belonged to the Food Court at Harker’s upper school and was causing headaches for users and food service employees alike. The app, created by an outside company, was the first attempt to go from paper to digital. However, it required myriad steps, and any missed or incorrect step might result in a wrong order or an incorrect charge. When Preeti Sharan, Harker’s information systems lead, expressed a desire to create a new app, she was directed to students involved in a fledgling club called HarkerDev, the school’s student software development organization.

She found students with an interest in coding who wanted to work together on projects that could benefit Harker as a whole but needed the experience of handson front- and back-end development. Though there were rough spots along the way, it opened the door for a studentadministration partnership that gives young programmers responsibilities rare in the world of secondary education.

In the eight years since, the Food Court app became one of the great success stories of HarkerDev.

“We went from something that was almost unusable to something that’s seamless,” said Eric Nelson, the club’s advisor and Harker’s computer science department chair.

“I gave them a task, and they were all willing to take it on,” Sharan said. “Software development in a professional environment is very different than high schoolers coding in a classroom. They rose above and beyond their level.