To graduate from Green Mountain High School (GMHS), students will need to complete the Jeffco required classes and receive passing grades. In addition to these classes, Green Mountain High School has 4 additional pillars of scholar. The pillars are called academies. Inside each academy contains 3-4 structured groups of classes called pathways. Johanna Tiwari, a current teacher and co-leader of Academies at GMHS explains, “[Pathways] give guidance for students post-high-school with the flexibility of having a full high school experience [including] choice. Pathways were created to give students structure…” [1]. By completing a pathway at GMHS, you will earn a chord at graduation along with an additional pathway completion tab on your transcript. The issue arises as students will have to complete pathways through their 4 years of high school. This means lots of planning and prep work will need to go into their course track as they go through each year of high school. This planning will need to start freshman year. Tiwari explains once more, “[The problem is] students have no idea where they are in pathway completion and how to use that to help with course completion” [1]. Rebecca Ketchum, another current teacher and co-leader of Academies at GMHS describes, "40% or less of freshmen, sophomores, and juniors complete the Google Document in the first place"[2]. A solution needs to be discussed to help students and solve this problem.

As of right now, for a student to understand what classes to take to complete a pathway, they need to fill out a Google Document that can be very tedious and confusing to understand. Completing this Google Document with a student’s schedule took about 6 minutes and 30 seconds, and 31 highlights and 124 clicks needed to be made. While this might seem like a small set of numbers, this also doesn’t take into account how there are lots of words in one spot with a small font. The Document itself is hard to read. There needs to be some new way for students to figure out what classes to register for. This solution not only needs to be quicker, and easier to fill out, but it also needs to be better worded and explained.

 Vaughn Hafner, a current senior at GMHS who has completed the Google Document, mentions “...all of my friends don’t like it. It takes so much time to complete the Document and all of the scrolling necessary to view each class is super tedious” [3]. This short snippet from Vaughn explains the main reason why people dislike or choose not to use the Google Document. It is simply that it is too tedious to complete. If there was some sort of alternative that streamlined the process, so that you could easily search for your classes, it might encourage more students to want to check where they are in certain academies.

In terms of brainstorming a solution for this issue, we need to choose between a technological approach or paper/pencil approach. In an article written by GCF Global, it reads, “There's almost no limit to what you can do online. The Internet makes it possible to quickly find information, communicate with people around the world, manage your finances, shop from home, listen to music, watch videos, and much, much more” [4]. This quote is important because it showcases that finding additional information on the internet is simple. If someone is trying to figure out what classes might be important for them later in college, the internet is the easiest place to find out. Emailing counselors with questions and viewing your transcript are also in the same place. Based on this information, an internet approach proves to be the best option.

After conducting a little research, it seems that no one has successfully improved on the Google Document. In terms of projects that were in the works, one of the bigger ones was Sherpa from the website imasse.com. After looking at the current state of this website and speaking with the current CEO of Imasse, Luke Pisano, it can be inferred that there are only a few things that need to be completed for this website to be functional. Luke explains, “Each class has its ID, that is then passed to the next page. Right now, [everything is] hardcoded JSON. Also, not all of the classes are inputted to the site database” [5]. In addition to Luke, an with an interview with Zack Flowers, leader of software engineering at Inspirato, was conducted. Zach mentions, “Data integrity is super important to ensure the longevity of it [website or coding project]” [6]. This proves that the best path to creating a solution would be to follow in Luke’s footsteps and finish his already started project. It would require adding all of the other classes to the site's JSON files, and also, instead of hardcoding everything in, pull the classes from some sort of Google Sheet to allow teachers to easily update the class lists. This would allow for the data to have strong integrity as it would make sure teachers and counselors are constantly updating it with the latest classes.

The questions now become which website host would be the easiest to work with, and how would a website be coded in the first place. To answer these questions fully, a deep dive will need to be taken into the specifics of website design and understand how Sherpa currently operates. After looking over the code for the actual website on Github, the website runs through a few coding languages. The languages are PHP, HTML, and JavaScript. In a lesson from W3Schools, an article reads “HTML is the standard markup language for creating Web pages, HTML describes the structure of a Web page, HTML elements tell the browser how to display the content” [7]. Using this information, it can be understand that HTML is the front end of websites and that the reason things like visual text and images are located in a certain place is because of HTML. An article from CodeInstitute reads, “PHP is an open-source, server-side programming language that can be used to create websites, applications, customer relationship management systems, and more. It is a widely-used general-purpose language that can be embedded into HTML” [8]. From this snippet, it’s implied that PHP is the brains behind the scenes of websites. While HTML displays all of the colors and text on sites, PHP is the code that runs buttons and search bars. An article by Mozilla Web Developers, explains, “...displaying timely content updates, interactive maps, animated 2D/3D graphics, scrolling video jukeboxes, etc. — you can bet that JavaScript is probably involved” [9]. This quote explains how if things like search bars are populating suggestions or videos are automatically playing in the background, JavaScript is the coding language at work. For example, on Sherpa, there is a search bar that will populate suggestions of classes as you type in it. This is likely run by JavaScript. With all of this in mind, the website will need to be coded using PHP, HTML, and JavaScript, while also hosting the website with a website host that supports all of those languages.

Luke, once more, explains, “I’m currently using Infinity Free as the website host for Sherpa. It allows me to code everything I need for the site for free. My advice is to code locally on a computer, then upload to it [website host] and Github to save work” [5]. Also, on their website, Infinity Free writes, “InfinityFree is website hosting with no time limit, and no limit on the number of websites you can host” [10]. This website host, Infinity Free, will be important to take note of because it is likely the best option to use when working on the website. A GitHub account can also be created to save the code that is worked on, just like Luke did. Not only will it protect the code by creating a backup, but it can also for easy sharing of code with Zach and Luke if questions arise. Next, Luke’s advice of coding locally on a computer first and then uploading to GitHub and webserver will be used. This means a code editor will need to be found that is cheap, easy to use, and supports HTML, PHP, and JavaScript.

After doing some research, the best option seems to be Visual Studio Code(VSCode). VS Code discusses on its site, “With support for hundreds of languages, VS Code helps you be instantly productive with syntax highlighting, bracket-matching, auto-indentation, box-selection, snippets, and more. Intuitive keyboard shortcuts, easy customization and community-contributed keyboard shortcut mappings let you navigate your code with ease” [11]. This short piece of information can allow the understanding that VS Code has the creator in mind when they build and make updates to their program. This shows that the best free editor to code locally on is VS Code.

Before design criteria is discussed, Zach explains once more, “Documentation is extremely important to ensure you and someone else can understand what’s going on. What does this JSON file do? Why does your code work this way? Make note of what materials you need to complete this project, for someone else to work on it” [6]. This information will also need to be taken into account. Instead of just coding blindly and not writing anything down, comments will be added to add descriptions about what certain things do. A separate document will also be made that contains all of the materials a person would need to work on this project. This will allow another person to easily continue my project.

To conclude, this project will need to produce a website prototype that contains all of the remaining classes for each academy at GMHS, a website that: is 90% functional, can allow a student to complete the whole site in 50% of the time it takes to complete the Google Document, can allow a student to make 50% of the clicks on the site than they do on the Google Document, and can allow a student to make 10% of the highlights on the site than they do on the Google Document. Furthermore, the website needs to allow the database of classes to be easily edited and updated by teachers.

Works Cited

1. J. Tiwari (2023, August 25). Interview with Johanna Tiwari [In-person interview]. Johanna is a current teacher at GMHS. She is also a chemical engineer who graduated from Bucknell University, located in Pennsylvania.

2. R. Ketchum (2023, November 3). Interview with Rebecca Ketchum [In-person interview]. Rebecca is a current teacher at GMHS.

3. V. Hafner (2023, August 31). Interview with Vaughn Hafner [Video Call interview]. Vaughn is a current senior at GMHS and is involved in the STEM pathways that are offered at GMHS.

4. “Internet Basics: What Can You Do Online?” GCFGlobal.Org, GCFGlobal Learning, edu.gcfglobal.org/en/internetbasics/what-can-you-do-online/1/. Accessed 1 Sept. 2023. 

5. L. Pisano (2023, August 26). Interview with Luke Pisano [FaceTime interview]. Luke is an alumni of GMHS, the current CEO of Imasse.com, and a current college student at the Colorado School of Mines located in Golden, Colorado.

6. Z. Flowers (2023, August 27). Interview with Zach Flowers [GoogleMeet interview]. Zach is the current Director of Software Engineering at the travel company Inspirato, located in Denver, Colorado.

7. “HTML Introduction.” Introduction to HTML, www.w3schools.com/html/html_intro.asp. Accessed 1 Sept. 2023. 

8. Toal, Rory. “What is PHP? Uses & Introduction.” Code Institute, https://codeinstitute.net/global/blog/what-is-php-programming/. Accessed 1 September 2023.

9. “What is JavaScript? - Learn web development | MDN.” MDN Web Docs, 15 August 2023, https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Learn/JavaScript/First_steps/What_is_JavaScript. Accessed 1 September 2023.

10. Free Web Hosting with PHP and MySQL, https://www.infinityfree.com/. Accessed 1 September 2023.

11. “Why Visual Studio Code?” Visual Studio Code, https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/editor/whyvscode. Accessed 1 September 2023