“Aspine” is a website that makes it easier for Cambridge Public School students to access and predict their grades. Aspine has been for over five years by thousands of middle and high school students in the Cambridge Public School District. (CRLS ‘Staple’ Aspine Returns) Aspine provides students a range of features allowing students to check their weighted/unweighted GPAs, keep track of class schedule and calculate required grades on assignments. All features that the existing CRLS grade database (Aspen) lacks.
The original code base was created by Cole Killian ’19 and Max Katz-Christy ’19 who passed it on to me on graduation to continue developing the app, I started a computer science club my Junior year of high school (which still exists today). I lead meetings of about 10 other students to discuss adding new features, delegate tasks, and teach new students how to use tools like git and nodeJS to collaborate on the project.
As President of the Club during high school I accomplished a number of things:
• Led team of student programmers, working with District IT Manager, to develop and deploy a web-based and mobile “front end” interface to the Cambridge High School’s online academic records system used by hundreds of students daily.
• Taught fellow students how to collaborate using git version control, and program in HTML/CSS/Javascript/node.js.
• Worked with the Cambridge Public School District (CPSD) IT Department to establish software staging and release procedures using District IT servers and manage data security and privacy concerns. Initially, the school thought our software was a security risk attempted to “hack” the schools grade database. After meeting with the head of CPSD IT I explained the utility of my software and he agreed to support my club and with us to release it on the CPSD domain while protecting student information. (See project code and documentation at GitHub).
Technical Details:
Aspine is open-source is written in Javascript and uses a RESTful API integration, and more. The framework is designed to be lightweight and flexible, allowing developers to build customized SPAs quickly and efficiently. The repository contains detailed documentation on how to install and use the framework, as well as examples and demos to help users get started.
The Aspine GitHub repository provides detailed documentation, including a quick start guide, installation instructions, and API reference. The documentation is written in a clear and concise manner and includes helpful examples and code snippets.
Relevant Links:
Aspine Open Source GitHub Repository
Ken Kalin 
Leave a Reply