The infrastructure behind experiential learning
Experiential programs, service learning, "Week Without Walls" trips, activity days, STEAM workshops, are the experiences students remember most. They're also a logistics nightmare: hundreds of students, ranked preferences, capacity caps, fairness constraints, and teacher staffing, all of which has to resolve into a clean assignment before anyone boards a bus.
Over a single year I built and ran the assignment engines for four of AISC's flagship programs. Individually each saved real time; together they formed a reusable pattern for how the school runs experiential learning at scale.
Great programs, fragile logistics
Every one of these programs was being assembled by hand, different spreadsheets, different people, different ad-hoc rules each time. The work was invisible until it broke: an over-capacity trip, a grade-skewed workshop, a student who never got placed. And because the process lived in someone's head, it couldn't be handed off or trusted to run the same way twice.
Four assignment engines, one pattern
SEVAI Community Service
Oct–Nov 2025The system that started it all: a 700+ line engine assigning 150+ students to 12 activities by ranked preference, with grade balance, capacity limits, automated notifications, and test mode. Saved 20–30 hours per cycle. Full case study →
Discover India, "Week Without Walls"
Apr–May 2026The largest of the four. A complete assignment algorithm plus a 50+ page operations manual to place ~237 students across 15 trips spanning three pillars, Adventure, Service, and Culture. Handled 215+ student sign-up responses, capacity rules (20 students and 3 teachers per trip), gender balance, and a formal appeals process. I built the backend engine; I also chaperoned a trip myself.
Discovery Day 2026
Feb 2026Automated assignment across 34 activities, morning, afternoon, and full-day sessions, from 215 student sign-up responses, with a capacity-tracked dashboard and near-full assignment at launch.
STEAM Week 2026 Distribution
Mar 2026An automated workshop-distribution tool allocating 120+ students across 12+ prototype workshops over three days for Grades 6–8. I owned the assignment-automation piece in partnership with the program leads.
Hundreds of students, placed reliably
Across SEVAI, Discover India, Discovery Day, and STEAM Week, the systems placed well over 700 students by ranked preference while enforcing capacity, grade, and gender balance, and they did it repeatably. Each program could re-run its assignment, preview before committing, and hand the process to someone new without losing the logic.
The Discover India system in particular was built as a deliberate handover artifact: 50+ pages of documentation alongside the algorithm, so the school's signature trip program could keep running long after I left.
What I'd carry forward
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Logistics is pedagogy’s silent partner.
The trip nobody remembers as "well-organized" is the one that worked. Good assignment infrastructure is invisible by design, and that’s the point.
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Reuse beats rebuild.
Solving SEVAI cleanly meant Discover India, Discovery Day, and STEAM Week each started from a proven pattern instead of a blank spreadsheet.
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Build the manual, not just the machine.
A 50+ page operations manual is what turns a clever script into an institutional system that outlives its author.