Project Description

Client: Ruth Ladderud, American Association of University Women, Walla Walla. (Ruth works at Whitman College.)

The Great Explorations program is a biennial day of STEM workshops for middle-school girls. Until now, registration has been conducted by pencil-and-paper, through the mail. The organizer has manually assigned 400+ girls to 27 different workshop topics. This project would seek to move registration online and automate the workshop assignment process.

Of course, there are complications. Most girls are expected to pay a small registration fee to ensure commitment, but this fee is waived for those who would find it financially burdensome. When girls register, they rank six workshops, and are assigned to three of them. Each session includes girls of the same age (e.g., all 6th grade girls). Girls can also name a friend who they want to attend workshops with. The current workshop assignment algorithm is first-come first-served (FCFS), since that is all the organizer can manage by hand, but more sophisticated algorithms might maximize equity (by ensuring the last to register have the same opportunities as the first) or maximize utility (by getting as many girls as possible into their most preferred workshops).

In this first year, the project might focus on developing a Web-based registration system that takes payments, handles scholarships, and stores workshop preferences. Ideally, it will also assign girls to workshops using a FCFS algorithm. However, this project might instead explore the effects of using different workshop assignment algorithms, starting with FCFS.