Kids Week

A new school year brings a stack of paper: welcome letters, class schedules, picture day flyers, supply lists. Then come the club pages, the swim school's schedule and two school calendars.

Our family calendar had all of it, but a calendar app answers "what's happening at 3 PM" and not "who do I pick up today, and where." The people who help us with pickups needed one link they could open on a phone and read in five seconds.

Each child gets a row and each day gets a column. School drop-off and pickup sit in a quiet gray strip at the top of every school day, and activities sit below as cards tinted in that child's color.

The page opens with today in the first column. The arrows step one day at a time, and swiping snaps cleanly from day to day. The columns resize so a whole number of days always fits the screen, with no sliver of a third day hanging off the edge.

Swiping drags the days with your finger, and letting go settles the grid onto the next whole day instead of stopping halfway. The arrows ease one day at a time, and the date range in the title follows along.

Switching between light and dark fades the colors over a third of a second, so the page changes mood without a jarring flash. Both motions respect the reduced-motion setting on the phone.

The first version came together quickly and had everything: a subtitle, a color key, each child's grade and school, a colored accent bar on every card and heavy dividers between weeks. I reviewed it on my phone, the way the family would, and took things away one at a time.

• check_circleThe color key went first. Names sit right next to their rows, so the key repeated what the grid already said.
• check_circleThe wide name column became a thin strip with each name set sideways in its color, which gave the days more room.
• check_circle"Week of" left the title, and the date range moved between the arrows.
• check_circleSmall walking-person icons replaced the Drop-off and Pickup labels for one round. They read as decoration, so the words came back.

• check_circleOn club days, pickup moves to when the club ends. With two clubs on one day, it uses the later one.
• check_circleA "Hide drop-off & pickup" button turns the grid into an activities-only view. Each device remembers the choice.
• check_circleActivities get an emoji from their name, so swim, dance, soccer or chess is recognizable before you read a word.
• check_circleNo-school days say so, and after-school clubs drop off those days automatically.
• check_circleLight mode by default, with a Material Symbols sun and moon toggle for anyone who prefers dark.

A kids' schedule is exactly the kind of thing that shouldn't be readable by anyone who stumbles on a link. Free web hosting is public, so the page itself had to protect the content.

The readable schedule lives in a private repository. What gets published is an encrypted copy (AES-256, with the key derived from a family passphrase), so the public files contain no names, schools or times. Family members type the passphrase once, and their phone remembers it after that.

I built Kids Week with Claude in a single afternoon and evening. I made the design calls and reviewed every change on a real phone. Claude read our family calendar and the school's club calendar, wrote the code, and pushed each update to both repositories so the family link stayed current.

That loop of asking for a change, seeing it live within minutes and keeping or reverting it is what made the round of deletions practical. Trying something cost almost nothing, so I could judge it on the device instead of in my head.