The console of a car filled with campus brochures, scribbled notes, business cards and half-forgotten impressions can make college visits feel stressful instead of exciting. For one student, this chaos sparked an idea.
Instead of flipping through crumpled pamphlets and trying to remember which college felt like “the one,” WHS junior Chase Roofener, decided to build something better. Meet Toured, an iOS app meant to track every tour, every detail and every feeling along this important journey.
With Toured, students can explore more than 6,000 colleges across the United States, accessing key details like admissions statistics, tuition costs, financial aid information and graduation rates. The app lets students organize schools by interest level, view them on an interactive map and plan visits with ease.
While touring campuses, users can document their experiences in real time by adding notes, photos and impressions to a shared family timeline. Toured also allows users to scan admissions business cards, receive recommendations from parents, rate each school across multiple categories, compare options side by side and ultimately help them discover the best fit for their future.
One of the app’s most useful features is how it turns college visits into a shared, real time experience. Roofener explained, “Your parent can actually join the visit from their phone and they can collaborate live. So you can almost think of it as a live Google Doc, but it’s streamlined for this. And when they take photos, it automatically pops up on your phone and it’s a live activity on your lock screen.”
With the new app, students won’t have to worry about remembering every detail from multiple college visits or sharing them with a parent who couldn’t be there.
Roofener has been interested in technology since he was a kid, which he said drove him to create a solution to the problem. “I started [the app] in December,” Roofener said. “It was about a four or five month development process, and it’s a new way of developing with AI-assisted coding.”
Roofener shared that the app has around 80,000 lines of code embedded, which would normally take a team of 2 or 3, 2 years to complete. With the new era of AI technology, Roofener was able to do it alone in a few months.
Roofener is continuing to develop the app with a focus on improving the user experience. He aims to make it more intuitive and even easier to navigate. Roofener says he hopes to include direct access to AI through the app, which can provide more insight and information for specific questions from the user.
As of now, you can download the app for free, but there is limited use for parts of the app without a subscription. To make it more accessible to his peers, he has developed a membership program that offers WHS students six months free on Toured (see the box below for the code).
This app demonstrates how students use technology to solve real world problems. As the college process becomes more complex, tools like Toured make it easier for future students to stay organized and make confident decisions when choosing a college.