My DECA students helped build RallyOrder

I teach business at Coeur d’Alene High School and advise our DECA chapter, which means I also help run a student store. Advisors know what that second job usually looks like: you work with the tools you can get approved, and you make it work.

When RallyOrder reached out to me, I jumped at the chance to have my students help influence what a new DECA SBE point-of-sale education platform could look like.

They kept coming back

A lot of companies talk to educators. Fewer sit in the back of a classroom during a lunch rush, watch a sophomore work a line, and take notes. The RallyOrder team did that, and then they did it again, week after week, for months. I think the front office knew them on a first name basis.

RallyOrder would bring a new concept: a design sketch, a prototype on a tablet, two versions of the same screen. My students would run it, poke at it, debate what they liked and didn’t like and then tell them what was wrong with it. Teenagers are magnificent at telling you what’s wrong with a piece of technology. The team would always encourage brutal honesty and as much feedback as possible. Then they would leave, work on the product, and come back with the next version having incorporated the feedback.

My students argued about button sizes. They argued about the best way to handle split payments and what was wrong with the current platform. They told the team which ideas felt like something a grown-up thought students would want, and which ones felt right. I watched ideas my students pushed back on disappear from the platform, and ideas they asked for show up in the next build.

We made it a real focus to figure out how the platform would help students in the store, in the classroom, and at competitions. I wanted RallyOrder to help my students have the best chance of winning State or ICDC.

Setup day

When the finished product came back to us as a ready-to-go point of sale, I’ll be honest about my expectations: I didn’t know what to expect or how long it would take to get going.

We got the platform up and running in one day. The register paired to our store with a code, the catalog we’d built loaded onto it, and my students were ringing sales before the end of class.

The side-by-side test

We didn’t rip anything out. We ran RallyOrder right next to our existing register, both live, same store, and I let the store crew choose their machine each shift.

That was the honest test, and my students settled it within a few days: they kept choosing the RallyOrder side, and I watched them long enough to know it was more than newness: the line moved faster, the screen made sense to the person standing at it, and they could see their own sales data in the classroom afterward. Students could see the work they put in during the feedback sessions show up in the real world and on the screens.

What I’d tell another advisor

Two things.

First, your students’ judgment is worth more than they know. Mine shaped a real product because a company was willing to listen. Put your crew in front of real decisions every chance you get; the store is full of them. RallyOrder is set up to give students the responsibility of managing the catalog, setting prices, evaluating margins, researching analytics, and getting ready for competitions.

Second, the tools matter more than we admit. I watched the same students, the same store, and the same lunch rush feel different on a register that was built for them. We didn’t have to come up with any work-arounds or find an ‘offline way’ to handle something.

Our store helped build this thing and we are really proud of the end result.