What it is
Discover India is AISC's "Week Without Walls" program, the experiential trips that define a student's first year of high school. For SY 2026–27, that meant placing 237 incoming Grade 9 students across 15 trips spanning three pillars: Adventure, Service, and Culture. I built the complete assignment algorithm and a 50-page operations manual that turns a sprawling, high-stakes placement problem into a repeatable, documented process.
I built the backend assignment engine; Riedwaan Kader was the student-facing lead. And it wasn't purely a desk project, I also went on the trip itself as a chaperone in September 2025.
A high-stakes placement done by hand
Assigning an entire grade to experiential trips is one of the hardest logistics problems a school faces. Every student ranks their preferences; every trip has a hard capacity (20 students and 3 teachers) and needs gender balance; and the result has to feel fair to 237 teenagers and their parents. Done by hand, it's days of work, opaque decisions, and no clean way to explain why any one student ended up where they did.
It also wasn't durable. The knowledge lived in one person's spreadsheet and one person's head, which is exactly the kind of single point of failure a school's signature program shouldn't have.
An assignment algorithm plus a full operations manual
The system runs on Google Sheets, Google Forms, and Apps Script, native to the school's workspace, and pairs the automation with the documentation a program needs to outlive its builder:
- Student sign-up form. A Google Form that collected 215+ ranked-preference responses from incoming Grade 9 students.
- Teacher sign-up form. A parallel form to staff each trip with the right faculty leads.
- Assignment algorithm. Places every student by ranked preference while enforcing capacity (20 students / 3 teachers per trip) and gender balance.
- Capacity-tracked spreadsheet. A live dashboard showing fill rates across all 15 trips so no trip over- or under-fills.
- Appeals process. A formal, documented path for students to request a change after assignments go out.
- 50-page operations manual. Step-by-step documentation so the program runs the same way next year, with or without me.
It was deliberately built for handover in April–May 2026, scope comparable to the SEVAI system, but at grade-wide scale and with a much heavier documentation layer.
An entire grade placed, fairly and on the record
The system placed all 237 students across 15 trips by ranked preference while holding capacity and gender-balance rules consistently, and, just as important, it made every placement explainable. The capacity dashboard and appeals process turned a process that used to live in one head into something the whole program team could see and trust.
Because it shipped with 50 pages of documentation, AISC's signature Grade 9 trip program can keep running long after I leave, the clearest test of whether a system has actually become institutional infrastructure.
What I'd carry forward
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Fairness has to be legible.
For a placement 237 families will scrutinize, being fair isn't enough, the system has to make it visible why each student landed where they did.
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Documentation is the deliverable.
50 pages of operations manual is what separates a clever one-off script from a program the school can run again next year.
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Build it, then go live it.
Chaperoning the trip I'd assigned students to closed the loop, the logistics only matter because of the experience they make possible.
Discover India is the largest of a family of assignment engines I built, see the Student Assignment Systems overview.