A post-mortem of electing student executives — without being in school
On May 22, 2020, the 1,600 students of John Fraser Secondary School would have lined up in the atrium to cast their ballots for next year’s Student Activity Council (SAC) executives. In previous years, it was a crowded affair. This year, crowds are illegal.
Fraser Votes was initially conceived in late 2019 as part of the school’s effort to transition to digital infrastructure. JFSS had already rolled out digital timetables, obsoleting the thousands of printed timetables distributed at the start of every term. We created the system with our values in mind: democracy and student's voice.
As a novel student-built…
An exercise in taking a joke to its logical extreme with the power of data because Big Data isn’t just for corporations
We often hear about Big Data infiltrating one industry or another. To an extent, we all understand that the technological world we live in produces data at a rate never before seen in human history. We also have, at our fingertips, terribly powerful tools (like Mathematica, whose builtin library contains anything that anyone would ever need) that let us analyze that data. Endless data lets smart people solve the world’s biggest problems.
It also lets bored high school students produce real answers to absurd questions.
Consider a stupid offhanded remark by a friend of mine. You see, there are two…
An adventure in getting around that pesky checkbox.
Have you ever met someone who abhors technology and wishes all cell phones would instantly poof out of existence? That’s my math teacher. Fortunately for the rest of us, she understands that technology is the future, whether or not she likes it. She decided to start posting material on Google Classroom — a great start. The only glaring problem is that she disabled download and print functions! It’s no secret that viewing large PDFs in the browser is both slow, tedious, and generally excruciating. …
James Ah Yong
some uni kid with too much time in his life.
