Harker’s Tech Club has developed a new election software program. The program used during freshman Honor Council elections in January will be brought back for the upcoming April ASB, Student Council and Honor Council elections.

Work on the program began last spring and was coordinated by Prag Batra, grade 12. Batra said, “Some of the biggest challenges involved developing an intuitive drag-and-drop interface and bug testing.”

The software is online and Web-based. Users visit a website on a designated school computer, enter a code given to them (to preserve anonymity), then indicate their preferences for each officer position on a series of screens. On each screen, users drag and drop their preferred candidates from the left side of the screen into a list on the right side in order of desired preference.

Students used PHP, CSS, HTML and JavaScript to build the software, which is hosted as a website on a server.

The most memorable moment for Batra was seeing the site come to life after several hours of coding testing. “It was very rewarding in the end once we had a fully working final product ready,” said Batra. “I think this sense of knowing that we built a working product that would then be used by hundreds of fellow students was what made the entire project worthwhile for us.”

After the software was ready for the Honor Council elections, Batra worked with teachers and administrators to deploy it and set it up for the elections.

Pauline Paskali, upper school English teacher and one of the first to see the technology said, “These young people are extraordinary in their willingness to spend countless hours working on projects for the school. They deserve to be commended for their skill, their perseverance and their generosity.”

If you’d like to see the results of a poll conducted using the software during STEM week, head over to http://web.harker.org/vote/STEM/results