mission: to accurately simulate Arizona’s public education system to help policymakers make more informed decisions.
role: PM, frontend dev, backend design, research
foundations
most of the demographic and standards data was available on AZ Report Cards
as for the 3d components, there are schools, residences, and recreation. we plotted the components based on state zoning data.
there are 3 tiers of each component. which version gets rendered is based on population data (high population density = a city component.)
utility
the sim is meant to help policymakers make better-informed decisions, so macro views were added to aid this function.
main learnings:
- just read the docs! the entire sim is powered by sim.py (before GPT, this was the most comprehensive option). There was many a time in the backend phase where we implemented convulated solutions only to backtrack once we read a new section of the docs and found a direct fix.
- you can spend a lot of time on something and it still doesn’t work out or make the impact that you hoped for. at the end of the say, you should aim primarily to do work that you are truly proud of. when i pitched this project as a freshman, i never would have imagined that the lab would be endowed 1M dollars to build it... only for the funding to be pulled 6 months later. We continued the project after, but many of the original team members graduated and left the lab. Progress dropped off and the archive is now archived. This is an idea that still excites me though, and I can see myself picking up where we left off one day. Ideas never die!