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This article appears in print in the March 2018 issue. Click here to subscribe.

If you’ve ever spent hours in front of a computer trying to schedule your kids for multiple summer camps while also taking their ages and interests (and your driving constraints) into account, Helen Wang has shared your pain.

That’s why the Bellevue mom, who is also a computer scientist, last year started 6crickets, a service that gathers information from thousands of summer camp programs and classes into a convenient central database and allows users to make and compare weekly schedules, use a single registration form for multiple children, check out and pay, all in one easy stop.

When should parents start looking?

“Like in anything, there is a bell curve,” Wang says. “Parents start as early as February.”