@Lindagaf - I’ll be sure to mention the App to my son (and use the right name). He seems to have quickly found a good group of friends so maybe they’d be willing to take a shot at hosting a lunch. I’ll also mention it to a teenage neighbor who looks after my cats when I travel. (She’s one of those delightful teens who enjoys having serious conversations with adults.) I’d like to hear her take on it.
I looked at some of the user reviews on the Apple App Store. Lots of praise but there’s definitely the sense that the app needs to build a critical mass of ambassador/hosts. One comment I found interesting was a user who noted that the product marketing material shows drawings of smiling, happy, students who are uniformly slim and pretty and athletic. The user suggested that maybe they could think about their messaging in that regard…which I thought was a good point.
Yes, without a critical mass of users it won’t work. Apparently though the schools in the vicinity of where the creator lives are already using it successfully.
At D’s middle school, they had long tables, everyone sat in the cafeteria, and you went with your class and just filed in. At her new high school, most clubs have lunch meetings so the kids tend to find their niches anyway. However, phones are forbidden to be seen and/or heard unless a teacher allows them in a particular class. This includes lunch, so there is no way the app would be able to be used.
She also attends a large school with multiple lunches starting at 10:30, so we know what that’s like. We just named it brunch and D takes protein snacks to eat in the hall during class changes later in the day.
Some California schools are very different. Maybe other areas without snow are as well? There are no halls. The buildings are scattered all over with the classrooms all opening to the outside. At lunch everyone is outside wandering about. There’s not a ton of supervision to speak of so even if phone use was banned, that would be a joke.
Now there’s a fence and only a few places you can wander off campus. It used to be complete chaos in terms of supposedly only the seniors being allowed off for lunch.