Noah Brauner ’25 first took Harvard’s Introduction to Computer Science course online when he was 13. Now a sophomore at Harvard, CS50 is on Brauner’s schedule again—but this time, he is teaching it.
In 2021, while taking AP Computer Science with science faculty member Dominic Manzo, Brauner set out to revamp the existing Nobles app to better organize school information in one place. Collaborating with Database Services Manager Tessy Smith, Brauner developed the app during his free time. The result was a newly redesigned version that introduced new components and simplified life for the Nobles community. Still, there were two issues causing Brauner to feel that his work was not done—it only worked on iPhones, and offered limited features to faculty and staff.
Not long after Brauner left for college, he reached out to Nobles’ Information System and Support (ISS) department to propose another rebuild of the Nobles app—this time prioritizing accessibility of the app on both iOS and Android, and improving the experience for students, faculty, staff, and parents/guardians. In January 2026, this time under contract with Nobles, Brauner set out to make these enhancements.
In September, the latest version of the Nobles app was released, achieving Brauner’s ultimate goal of accessibility and offering expanded features for each constituent. New features include a single Veracross sign-in, advising and college counseling information, a clubs feature that syncs events that sync to GCal and mailing lists, built-in privacy, and 15 new and challenging Easter eggs that unlock a secret page.
“The complexity went up, because we’re working with all these different platforms now,” explains Brauner. “It has to be on iPhones, Android, and the web, and it has to look good on all different screen sizes, not just like a small set of phones, so the complexity definitely went up, but it was a great time programming it.”
While Brauner led the app’s redesign and development, his collaboration with Smith was essential to the project’s success. Her database expertise and deep familiarity with Nobles helped him build an app designed for the entire community.
“I was working with Tessy Smith pretty much constantly throughout this project,” shares Brauner. “The old app would pull in data from systems that Tessy would create for me, whereas this new app talks to Veracross directly, and that’s how people sign in once and never need to sign in again. However, that still required a lot of work between me and Tessy because she’s the one who runs Veracross for Nobles.”
Smith also brought the perspective of a teacher and parent to their partnership. “She’s been a Nobles community member for a lot longer than I’ve been alive,” says Brauner, “so she had a lot of good insights into what teachers and parents would want, having been in both of those roles, and then I had some insights and like what students might want. It was a great partnership.”
Smith echoes similar praise about her experience collaborating with Noah on these two significant projects during his years at Nobles. “He’s the most positive human,” she shares. “He is just so passionate about everything and making everything right—and it’s more important to him that we get everything we need than he gets paid for every single little feature.”
“It really does feel like a complete work now, that I am very proud of,” shares Brauner.
For a glimpse of the new Nobles app, please see the gallery below. All images were created with sample data.
