Learning Unlimited

Web Page: http://wiki.learningu.org/GSOC_Ideas

Mailing List: http://lists.learningu.org/mailman/listinfo/web-team

Learning Unlimited (LU) creates opportunities for middle school and high school students to explore a variety of topics --- from quantum mechanics to urban design to modern poetry to street drumming --- so that students can find what they love to learn. Our mentoring and support enables college students to run independent educational programs on their campuses where they teach their passions, sharing them with younger generations. We support programs running at MIT, Stanford, the University of Chicago, Duke, Northwestern, and Boston College, whose combined reach is over 6000 pre-college students each year taught by over 700 volunteers. We are also mentoring startup efforts at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, UCLA, Yale, and Southwestern University, and are continuing to grow each year. LU maintains an extensive open-source Web application system that provides the automation needed for small teams of college students to run programs that scale to hundreds of classes and thousands of participants. This system allows teachers to register classes, students to sign up for classes, and administrators to schedule classes; however, this is only the tip of the iceberg. Web sites running on our code have complex user searching, querying, and e-mailing capabilities; automated generation of printed materials such as course catalogs and attendance sheets; and heavily customizable front-end interfaces. We are seeking interns to join the volunteers that work on this codebase.

Projects

• Django-based Custom Form Builder and Data Viewing Module I propose to create a Django-based custom form creation module that will make it very easy for a non-technical user to create a form, view responses, and perform basic queries on the data. It will be closely integrated with Learning Unlimited's code base, so that forms can be linked to programs and courses, fields can be tied to existing database entries, and individual responses can be tied to users. I will later modify it so that it can be used and extended as a generic form builder.
• Junction app interface == Custom web forms + Views of data + New student reg An all inclusive project which will touch aspects of a few of LU's proposed projects. The goals of this project are two-fold: to clean up and/or abstracting certain aspects of the website, and to create a usable, ideal interface for programs which are application based (as opposed to lottery or FCFS based).