How to Build Each Project

School board approval — submit proposal 4 months in advance. Include safety plan, volunteer background check process, curriculum outline.

Pre/post survey — use a validated "CS interest" Likert scale (5 questions). Get IRB exemption: this is educational program evaluation, not human subjects research.

Parental consent — required for photography, data collection, and any communication channel used.

Curriculum ownership — at least 40% of curriculum must be original work (not from GWC standard curriculum). Document what you created.

Sustainability plan — document how the camp continues after you graduate. Identify a successor and create an operations guide.

Official GWC affiliation — apply at girlswhocode.com/clubs. Must have faculty sponsor and complete the affiliation process.

AP CS pipeline documentation — counselor signs off on which members enrolled in AP CS the following year. FERPA releases obtained from families.

Student-led structure — you are the facilitator, not the teacher. Members should eventually lead sessions. Document this progression.

End-of-year showcase — public demo day where all members present projects. Invite school board members, parents, local press.

CLIP image matching — extract embeddings for all submitted photos. Match using cosine similarity. Threshold must be tuned: too low → false positives, too high → missed matches.

District adoption — pitch to district IT. Must present FERPA compliance documentation, data retention policy, and privacy safeguards. No facial recognition.

Quantified impact — track: items submitted, items matched, match rate, average time-to-match. Before/after comparison with prior year's lost property reports.

No PII — no user accounts with identifying info. Use anonymous nicknames. Items linked only to "finder" and "owner" roles, not individuals.

Adoption beyond your own club — this is non-negotiable. The leadership story is the 14 other clubs. You must conduct user research, demos, and handle objections.

Real usage data — analytics showing attendance rates, event creation, active users per club. Not just installed — actively used.

Officer election module — verifiable, tamper-resistant voting for club leadership transitions. This is the feature that makes it institutionally valuable.

Data portability — clubs can export their data. This is required for school district compliance and builds trust.

Tutor verification — each tutor requires a teacher recommendation letter (uploaded, reviewed by you). This is the quality signal that separates the platform from random internet strangers.

Real payments — Stripe Connect for tutor payouts. Even $10 tutored sessions count. The economic transaction is the proof of genuine value exchange.

Recruitment — recruiting 100 tutors is as much work as building the platform. Plan: school announcements, flyers, HS counselor referral, flyer at local middle schools.

Outcome tracking — ask tutoring pairs to report grade improvements at end of semester. Document with parent/student permission.

Non-trivial PRs — "good first issue" labeled bugs that require understanding the codebase. Not: docs fixes, typos, formatting. Must touch core logic.

Code review response — maintainers will request changes. How you respond to feedback is the evidence of professional communication and growth mindset.

Ships in production — PR must be merged AND shipped in a release. Include the release version in your documentation.

Individual contribution — if contributing to a project with other contributors, your specific contribution must be clearly delineated.

300 GitHub stars — requires: beautiful UI, comprehensive README with screenshots, installation guide, active maintenance. No abandoned repos.

Organic community discovery — post to r/homelab, not spam. Respond to every issue and PR. Real community engagement required for credibility.

YouTube references — reach out to homelab YouTubers with a clear value proposition. Don't ask for features; show them how it solves their specific use case.

Documentation — full README, architecture diagram, Docker compose examples, and troubleshooting guide. Documentation quality is the differentiator.

GitHub Classroom integration — teachers must not change their existing workflow. Auto-grading should trigger automatically on student submissions via GitHub Classroom webhooks.

Docker sandbox security — student code must be executed in isolated Docker containers with resource limits (CPU, memory, time). Security is non-negotiable.

Line-level feedback — not just "test failed." Show the specific line, the expected vs. actual output, and a hint pointing to the bug location.

Plagiarism detection — integrate MOSS or similar for similarity detection across submissions. Flag potential cheating for teacher review.

PHQ-4 validated instrument — use the actual PHQ-4 (4-question anxiety/depression screen) as the clinical backbone. Not a chatbot with personality — a structured clinical tool.

School board approval — submit comprehensive proposal including: privacy architecture, counselor escalation protocol, data retention policy, risk assessment. This is non-negotiable for launch.

Counselor escalation protocol — written script for handoff. Documented cases where escalation was triggered. Counselor sign-off on every escalation.

No PII, no storage of conversations — conversations are ephemeral. Only session outcome (screen result + escalation flag) is stored. This is the privacy architecture.

Regular safety audits — counselor reviews bot outputs monthly for appropriateness. Document audit findings.

AO-caliber feedback — feedback must be grounded in actual AO perspectives. Build a RAG knowledge base from: what top AOs say about essays, common mistakes, what "voice" actually means.

Validation study — 20 essays rated by both AI and a professional college counselor. Document correlation on each dimension. Publish methodology. This is the credibility document.

Usage analytics — track: unique users, essays processed, feedback rounds per essay, user satisfaction rating. Not just installed — actively used.

Acceptance documentation — with permission, document: which schools, what essays received AI feedback, admission outcome. This is the ultimate validation.