High school alum creates app to help students become more engaged with school

An app that Smithtown West High grad Kevin Camson built to help students become more engaged in school activities could have helped him too, he says.

In high school, Camson wrote computer code but he skipped clubs like Robotics and Maker Space that might have appealed to his technical interests, and sometimes just went straight home to his room after classes. 

“I didn’t always discover the groups I wish I had. … I had good friends but at times I was lonely and a bit lost,” Camson, 23 and a graduate of the University of Notre Dame in Indiana, told Smithtown Central School District leaders in a February presentation that mixed reflection on his school days with tech-bro braggadocio about “the future of ed-tech.” 

His app, called MOOV, culls and delivers to smartphones school information from class schedules, lunch menus, teachers’ extra help times and sports schedules. All of it, along with meeting information from the clubs Camson once skipped, appears on the app's home screen or can be accessed with a few touches. 

School board trustees last month approved a $16,666 contract prorated for the duration of the school year to pay for the school community to use the app. The district could renew for the full 2023-24 school year for $40,000. MOOV is free to download on the Google Play Store and the Apple App Store.

Camson, Smithtown High's 2018 class speaker , rolled out earlier versions to students at Notre Dame and Mount St. Mary’s University in Maryland. In 2022, he sent a cold pitch to Smithtown Superintendent Mark Secaur. 

Secaur steers a $267 million budget and discards most of the pitches he gets. He paid attention to this one because Smithtown educators have been trying for years to improve extracurricular engagement. Research — including a study conducted at Oceanside High School when Secaur was principal there — shows higher graduation rates for students who participate in clubs and teams, and extracurriculars can tie academically challenged students to a school community they might otherwise reject.   

"We continue to realize the importance of focusing on providing students opportunities for joy, opportunities to meet like-minded peers and take advantage of all the offerings we have,” Secaur said.

MOOV — the name is adapted from the slang expression "What's the move," meaning "what's going on," — has had good early reviews. 

Maddox Elbert, 15, president of the freshman class at Smithtown East, said a check-in by phone tap feature had made running student government meetings easier. Mary Purchacki, 49, president of the Smithtown West PTSA, said it delivered important information immediately: “You wake up and the alerts are there — A day or B day, what’s the lunch going to be — these are things kids need to know right in the morning.” 

While anyone can download the app, which is aimed primarily at high school students, some functions, like a bus tracker, are only available to students and parents. A function available only to administrators, contemplated but not yet in use, would include a 0-100 “engagement score” for each student, tracking extracurricular participation levels. 

It is intended as a tool for administrators to see “which [students] are slipping, which ones should we focus on,” Camson said. 

Secaur said there was no score that would trigger intervention, but that educators might consider a change in score, or a low score, among other factors in student well-being. Educators are likelier to use event attendance numbers to evaluate the district's extracurricular offerings, he said. 

For now, some of MOOV’s most popular functions are more basic. Club leaders and sports teams use TikTok-style videos to promote events, and families use the school bus tracker to shorten bus-stop waits.