Baby Project Tracker

Projects | Apr 25 2026 | Tom Von Lahndorff

Baby Project Tracker

My daughter mentioned to her psychology teacher that her dad does web development. The teacher asked her to ask me if there was an easier way to run the class's "baby project" — the assignment where students care for a simulated baby (a doll) for a week and have to respond to its needs at random hours like real parents.

The way it was being run: the teacher would email students with prompts like "the baby is crying" or "the baby is hungry," and the students were supposed to respond within a window with a text or photo proving they handled it. Tracking dozens of students across multiple class periods, all via email, was a logistical challenge.

I said sure, I'll build something.

What It Does

babyproject.website — a simple web app with two sides.

For teachers: create a class, hand out a code, fire off alerts ("baby crying", "baby hungry", "baby sick", etc.) to a single student or the whole class. Each alert starts a countdown. Students respond with a text message or photo. The teacher sees the whole class at a glance — who responded, who didn't, how long they took, and what they sent in.

For students: join a class with the code, get a phone-style notification when an alert fires, snap a photo or write a quick note, hit send. That's it.

The whole thing works as a PWA — students install it to their home screen and it acts like a native app, including push notifications when alerts come in.

How It Went

The first class loved it. The teacher loved it. It saved her hours of time and gave her actual data to grade with — response times, photos, the whole timeline of each student's week with their "baby."

A few weeks later she asked if another teacher at the school could use it too. That's when I made it generic — anyone can sign up as a teacher, create their own classes, and run their own projects. No setup, no fees, no hosting required.

How It's Built

Plain PHP, MySQL, and vanilla JS. No framework, no build step. The notification piece uses the Web Push API so it works on any modern phone without needing to build a real native app. Photos are stored on the server with proper validation and size limits.

It's hosted on cheap shared hosting and runs fine for the kind of load it sees. If it ever needs to scale up, it can — but it doesn't need to right now, so I haven't bothered.

The Real Win

A teacher had a problem. I built something over a weekend that solved it. Then her colleagues started using it too. Small, focused, useful and fun way for me help contribute to education.