Why build it
Theme Week is the school-wide event where students earn house points through recess challenges, competitions, and themed dress days. Existing solutions were paid, inflexible, or poorly suited to the school's specific needs.
I built the platform independently so it could be a centralized, live-updating leaderboard and announcement system accessible to students, parents, teachers, and the large campus display screens.
What it does
The public-facing site shows live house point totals, rankings, and announcements. A secure, role-restricted admin interface lets teachers and student leaders log in from any device to input points, make adjustments, and publish announcements in real time.
Updates propagate instantly across phones, laptops, and school TVs, with a clean interface suitable for public viewing on large displays.
Architecture and constraints
Strict budget meant the system had to be virtually free to operate. Vercel for deployment. Firebase for auth, database, and real-time synchronization.
The key technical challenge was instant, reliable update propagation across phones, laptops, and TVs without compromising the look on a public display.
Under two weeks
Completed in under two weeks through rapid iteration on usability testing and live organizer feedback. Drew on extensive research into modern web development, real-time databases, and access control. LLM-assisted development accelerated implementation while I kept full ownership of design and logic.
Impact
Significantly boosted engagement across the week. The leaderboard ran live across student devices and campus display screens, with points and announcements updating fast enough that the event's pace was no longer bottlenecked by manual scorekeeping.