This year we welcome a new computer science teacher to Ida B. Wells, Aram Ansell, the teacher of the student who created the school-wide event/announcement app: Trivory. And to everybody’s surprise and dismay, the entirety of the student body and staff have been pronouncing it wrong.

Terren Gurule, the student who invented the app, attended Roosevelt High School for his high school years. So, it was originally called “Rider” to represent the Rough Riders of Roosevelt High School. Although, when it started expanding its reach to other schools, he had to think of a different name. After contemplating it for a few weeks, he settled on Trivory.

“The reason why it’s pronounced Try-vory instead of Triv-ory is because he looked at it as like a triangle with three sides for students, school, and parents,” said Aram Ansell.

Gurule was working on Trivory all throughout high school and still is not done working on it. The main reason he started creating the program was that he saw a need for an easier form of communicating with teachers that could be fully customizable. Gurule still has many more plans for expanding Trivory and hopes to create a place where students can go to find anything they need. StudentVue, Canvas, announcements, and much more would all be accessible from one place and one app.

“He worked basically independently on it for all four years,” said Ansell. “He just pitched this idea early on and went for it. So I think it was an idea that he had for quite a while prior to being in my class,”

The first year of working on Trivory was spent just developing it and the second year was when it turned into an actual platform that Roosevelt used. The third year was when it got its second school on board, which happened to be here at Ida B. Wells. Then after that, the app just kept getting bigger and better and is now used in multiple schools throughout PPS.

“I’m excited to see when he has schools that are outside of Portland Public Schools,” said Ansell.“And he’s still working on it.” 

And there’s already so much more on Trivory than most people realize.

So many students go onto Trivory just to see their schedule and look at the calendar and don’t bother seeing what else the app has to offer. “There’s a lot of cool features that I think that people don’t really know about,” said Ansell. “Even at the school they’re not fully utilizing it.” For example, you can change what categories are shown on the calendar and personalize it for what you are interested in. You can also personalize the notifications so you only have to see what is important to you.

Another feature is the bus tracker, which is an underutilized tool that shows buses near you and what is the easiest route to get to school. And under the resources page, there are a handful of links that lead to helpful school-related pages so you can get to them easily without struggling to search for them.

Trivory is a great new app that was brought to us and it is only improving and getting better. Hopefully, students will soon realize its full potential and start using all of its features. Whenever you’re confused about the pronunciation, think about it as a triangle with three sides, making it pronounced as “Tri-vory”.