HouseBytes
House points, run from the front of the class. A teacher gets an allowance of points, awards them in a tap, and the live scoreboard on the classroom screen updates as they do it.
Overview
HouseBytes is an online house points system for schools and teachers. The house points tradition is decades old and was still being run on paper charts and whiteboards. HouseBytes wanted it live, on the screen at the front of the room.
A first-ever digital platform for teachers and schools, taking them from age-old educational ways to something rather more convenient.
Before it, there was no proper teacher and student management system behind any of this, which kept the interaction between them limited to whatever a teacher could track by hand.
HouseBytes came to Sphinx Solutions with the idea of strengthening that relationship and giving teachers one platform for the whole job. Our team went through the concept and built to it.
What we delivered serves teachers, educational professionals and schools, and turns awarding a point from an administrative chore into the most visible thing in the room.
HouseBytes wanted one platform where schools and teachers could manage pupil data and run a lesson, with the teaching tools built in: random selection, a timer, a stopwatch.
Teaching methods had stayed simple and limited. After the pandemic the education system needed the change, and HouseBytes wanted to digitise the parts of a teacher’s day that nobody should still be doing by hand.
The real challenge was not the software. It was improving a way of teaching and learning that had worked the same way for a very long time, which only happens if the replacement is genuinely reliable and genuinely convenient.
That meant covering what a teacher needs every day rather than a feature list: pupil information, grading and scoring, group creation and the classroom tools.
It also meant taking data security and privacy seriously, because the records involved belong to children, and making the whole thing reachable from anywhere a teacher happens to be.
Sphinx Solutions built HouseBytes a web application that took offline teaching and house management onto a platform teachers actually wanted to open.
A simple interface and a short list of things it does well is what made it popular with teachers and schools, and it is what the client was pleased with.
Tech stack
What people usually ask about HouseBytes and about building something like it.
It is a large job with a lot of moving parts. Define the objectives, collect every requirement, work on the system design and layouts, choose the tech stack, set up the development infrastructure, then test and assure the quality of what comes out.
A feature-packed educational app usually runs from $20,000 to $100,000, and around $150,000 once the features get genuinely complex. It turns on complexity, the feature set, the category and the developer’s rate.
Define the project goals, research the market, plan the design and prototype it, choose the right platform, build the front end and back end, test it properly, then launch and start collecting feedback.
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