cca

README

YKPS CCA Selection System (WIP)

Note: CI is actually currently disabled. I use pre-commit hooks to run all tests before committing.

This is my internal assessment for the IB Diploma Programme's Computer Science (Higher Level) course. The iadocs directory contains documentation required by the IB, while the docs directory contains the documentation that I actually plan to distribute for the production system.

Configuring, building and running

1. Copy docs/cca.scfg.example to cca.scfg and edit it to taste. The configuration file is well-documented. You probably need to add a client secret, change some paths, and change some listening options.
2. make
3. ./cca

Problems with the existing system

There are various issues with Schoolsbuddy, the current system our school uses for CCA registrations:

• There are various race conditions and locking issues that occur when too many students use the system at the same time. Course member caps are enforced by kicking random users out of the system while over-filling some courses, instead of having the course choice fail gracefully. The number of remaining seats in each course is also not updated live.
• If a lot of people are trying to load the Schoolsbuddy page, it takes ages.
• The web interface is extremely bloated and contains more than 10 megabytes of unnecessary JavaScript.
• The main interface displays three CCA periods, and inside each CCA period you can choose between Monsday/Wednesday and Tuesday/Thursday. That's a bit unintuitive.
• It seems to only support authentication by PowerSchool single sign-on, which is problematic because PowerSchool only supports a limited number of students logging on at the same time.
• The selection system does not enforce CCA hours requirements, and the CCA office's staff must manually verify that students have completed CCA choices to the year group's requirements, by literally printing out the spreadsheet to paper and reading through them.
• The school has to pay Schoolsbuddy a subscription fee, while something as simple as CCA selection could be easily accomplished on cheap hardware and minimal software.

Key questions

• How does the CCA staff enter available courses, teacher information, member caps, and timing information into the system? Would it be okay if I just accept a CSV spreadsheet?
  Apparently they use the Schoolsbuddy web page to do so. I'd add a CSV upload as that would be more convenient for most purposes.
• How do they get student choices out of the system and into PowerSchool?
  It looks like they export an Excel sheet. See docs/fields.txt.