by Marielle Payton, Student Public Relations Writer
It’s no secret college students have full schedules with classes and homework, not to mention extracurriculars. But with the help of his new website app “Homework Muffin,” Joel Kendall has solved one ever-present college student concern: time management.
Kendall, a 2022 Cedarville University economics graduate, created the time-management website to help students manage their time and homework more efficiently.
Homework Muffin started as a side project for Cedarville’s 2021 entrepreneurial Pitch event, which garnered him the first place $1,000 prize.
The idea has grown far beyond what Kendall imagined. Many college students use an app called Canvas, where faculty and professors upload their course requirements and syllabi for students to access. Kendall’s website app, Homework Muffin, is intended to grab assignments from Canvas and upload them into Google Calendar. The idea rapidly became popular with fellow Cedarville students, whom Kendall first marketed his product to. The only problem was he didn’t have the capacity to code an entire app on his own.
"Back in 2021, it had just been a product pitch, and barely a business idea,” said Kendall. “Now we’re in the final stages of conducting product-market research before our silent launch. It’s grown a lot.”
Kendall had long contemplated creating an app that would help organize college students’ lives by taking their syllabi and automatically organizing and transferring it into Google Calendar for easy access. By navigating to the online website and downloading the software to their devices, they could utilize this app for everyday use.
After encouragement from friends, Kendall decided to take a chance and enter his business idea into the Pitch, an event on campus that allows students to ‘pitch’ business ideas to business professionals. The economics program gave Kendall a solid foundation of the basics of running a company — and positive feedback from fellow students gave him the courage to enter his app into the competition.
Economics, one of the five majors offered by the Robert W. Plaster School of Business, offers not just business courses but actively integrates free market principles, aided by instruction from the department of history and government. This inter-department collaboration is a trademark of Cedarville’s holistic approach to entrepreneurship and economics.
“I learned to prioritize creating a service of value and quality rather than focusing solely on making money,” said Kendall. “I wanted to focus on something that would help people. It was absolutely invigorating to begin to realize people really liked this.”
Senior computer science students Josh Walden (Huntingtown, Maryland), David Kollmar (Spring Grove, Pennsylvania), Elijah Bautista (Beavercreek, Ohio) and Andrew Liu (Mason, Ohio) collaborated with Kendall to produce the website. Though Kendall doesn’t have an official launch date, what first began as a hypothetical project is now a fully-fledged, funded website soon to be available.
Located in southwest Ohio, Cedarville University is an accredited, Christ-centered, Baptist institution with an enrollment of 5,082 undergraduate, graduate, and dual-enrolled high school students in more than 175 areas of study. Founded in 1887, Cedarville is one of the largest private universities in Ohio, recognized nationally for its authentic Christian community, rigorous academic programs, including economics, as well as high graduation and retention rates, accredited professional and health science offerings. Cedarville has been ranked #4 nationally by the Wall Street Journal for student engagement. For more information about the University, visit cedarville.edu.