Teacher-Developed 'Next Class' App Schedules Lessons by School Period, Not Clock Time
A teacher in China has released 'Next Class', a timetable app that schedules lessons by school period rather than clock time, he wrote in an account published on the Sspai Matrix community.
The app is named "Next Class". Its developer, a teacher, wrote that ordinary calendars do not match how teachers work. A calendar's reference axis is fixed clock time — one o'clock, two o'clock, three o'clock — while what a teacher records is that the third period on Wednesday has a lesson, not that a lesson begins at 10:00 on Wednesday morning. When a school switches schedules, the period number stays the same but its start and end times can move. At his school, four versions of the timetable were used in succession during the 2025-2026 school year. Recording lessons in a calendar would mean adjusting each one by hand after every change; the app keeps the school schedule as its axis, so lessons shift automatically when a different schedule is selected.
He wrote that he had used the timetable app iStudiez Pro and wrote about it in 2024, shortly before it ceased operation entirely and stopped synchronising. After trying several other apps without finding one that met his needs, he decided to build one himself.
He began learning SwiftUI last year but still could not start development from scratch. In the first half of this year he sketched the basic interfaces on paper and then left the project unfinished. Only after learning to work with AI assistance this summer did he turn the paper design into an app released on app stores.
In the app's resources section, teachers create and switch schedules. Because versions of a school timetable often differ only in a few places such as the lunch break or the long recess, a new schedule can be created from an old one as a template. A switching date can be set, so that lessons before that date follow the old schedule and later lessons follow the new one.
On the timetable page teachers can cancel a lesson, move it to another period, choose a permanent change, or enter arrangements such as classes that meet only in odd or even weeks. The developer wrote that duties outside teaching — before- and after-school duty, keeping order during recess, and lunch-time dormitory checks — were among the cases the app tries to cover.
The today page shows which period comes next and how much free time remains before it, and lets a teacher keep brief notes on each lesson. The slogan, "know the next class, take each day calmly", came from that idea, he wrote, adding that he had once run to a classroom after students came to fetch him because he had forgotten a lesson.
Before the release he noted features including filling in schedules from Word documents, importing timetables from Excel, automatic adjustment for statutory holiday shift days, and setting an entire week on a single page. After it went on sale, feedback from teachers on Xiaohongshu showed needs more complex than he had assumed: some use different schedules on different days of the same week, some teach two classes in one period, and some follow a three-week cycle. Duty-type non-teaching arrangements are not well supported in the current version. He said he will keep updating the app and closed by wishing teachers a happy Teachers' Day.