Julia Butler

During my senior year of high school, I took CollegeBoard's AP Computer Science Principles course. The final exam for this course included a standard multiple choice exam, researching computer science applications, and an independent program/application. This course marks the beginning of my interest in computer science and my first personal project, a Universal Grade Tracker.

The Universal Grade Tracker has the ability to keep track of multiple students' classes, grades, and GPAs. It provides an unweighted GPA and weighted GPA based on a 4.0 scale. The weights were based on my high school's GPA system, which was comparable to most American high schools. Unlike most websites and apps that I had seen, the Universal Grade Tracker also provides insight into how a student could improve their GPA, which classes were their strongest and weakest, and a class that the student had improved the most in over the course of the year.

My teacher decided to utilize Code.org for this class, so my project was made on that website. The user interface was made through Code.org's project builder. Each designated "page" had its own function, such as entering classes, grades, or viewing how the GPAs were calculated. The actual calculations and algorithms were implemented with JavaScript. However, the Universal Grade Tracker has permanent storage which Code.org handled.

As this was my first programming project, my understanding of coding conventions such as commenting and classes was limited. Since this was a requirement for the AP course, the only comments in my code describe some problems I ran into and how I solved them. Additionally, I did not know about efficiency, so there may be some areas of code that could be improved, as well as refactored. Since this was an introductory course into computers and coding, I learned a lot about the basics and have built a strong foundation for me to improve in other projects down the road.

Feel free to watch this video of the Universal Grade Tracker in action!