Marathon Kids

Marathon Kids is a national nonprofit program encouraging children to complete marathon-distance running over a school year. The organization needed a mobile application working across hundreds of schools with vastly different technical environments — from well-connected urban schools with iPads to rural schools where a single teacher's phone might be the only device. The existing paper-based tracking system was error-prone, created weeks of reporting lag, and could not provide the real-time encouragement and milestone celebrations that keep kids motivated. The app needed offline functionality for school fields with poor connectivity, seamless multi-school provisioning, and reliability for 50,000+ concurrent users during peak activity periods.

We built a cross-platform React Native application with role-specific interfaces: teachers get batch activity logging with class rosters and quick-add buttons, parents see their child's progress card with milestone celebrations, and administrators access school-wide dashboards. The offline-first architecture uses local SQLite storage synced through a custom conflict-resolution layer — teachers can record laps without internet and data syncs automatically when connectivity returns. The Node.js and TypeScript backend on AWS features an automated school provisioning pipeline where a Lambda function creates tenant spaces, generates accounts, configures grade-level settings, and sends onboarding materials within minutes. We implemented real-time leaderboards and milestone notifications using WebSockets for immediate student feedback.

The app supports over 50,000 active users across hundreds of schools. App startup time was optimized to 1.8 seconds from 4.2 seconds initially. The automated provisioning pipeline reduced school onboarding from 3 days to under 5 minutes. Teacher weekly active usage jumped from 34% to 78% after the role-specific redesign. The offline-first architecture achieved 99.7% data sync success rate even in schools with intermittent connectivity. Student participation increased 35% compared to schools using paper tracking. App Store rating improved from 3.2 to 4.6 stars, and the cross-platform approach reduced maintenance costs by approximately 40%.