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School choice transit hacknight

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laidig edited this page Jan 22, 2014 · 9 revisions

This page is broken down into four areas.

About

For the month of Jan and Feb, BetaNYC is doubling down on its advocacy investment in open data and focusing on building tools for City Council Members, their staff, and Community Boards. For eight weeks, we are looking at four data realms and building apps on top of that data: Crime and Public Safety, Schools and Transportation, Land Use, and NYC 311 data. These nights will feed into a two day hackathon (22/23 Feb), Code Across NYC.

On our first night, we explored what tools might be helpful for City Council Members, their staff, and Community Boards. You can find more of these ideas on BetaNYC's Project Idea board or read the notes from our first night:

This Fall the NYC Department of Education (NYCDOE) released its first-ever API for high school data. Already, six developers have built apps against it to help the 80,000 middle-school students and their families who choose high schools every year. < http://nycdoe.pediacities.com/ >

But, many students and parents want to narrow down their school options by for example, a given commute time, a given route, or other transportation considerations (i.e. I only want to take the subway). We need your help to add ease and functionality to the school choice experience.

The NYCDOE's choice model of admissions allows students to apply to a range of schools, rather than attending their nearest or zoned school. This model is intended to provide students with more educational options, incentivize schools to improve their offerings, and improve the school system at large.

Further, the NYCDOE has made significant efforts to provide students and parents with training and information resources to help them evaluate school options. Each student may submit up to 12 school choices, then a data-driven algorithm maximizes the match between students’ preferences and their school placements. Today, over half of students receive their top-ranked school choice and three quarters receive one of their three top picks.

Variability in the choice experience and of the components necessary for making informed choices are topics the DOE explored through fieldwork with the Public Policy Lab. The above and following includes some highlights from that work.

Who to Target (the user):

  • Middle school students, their families, and guidance counselors

Prompts for Design Action:

  • Kids need a push to investigate schools outside their comfort zone, so they don't miss good options
  • Kids should get personalized default lists, so they can focus on likely schools – or explore overlooked options

Key Technology:

  • Improved search capabilities
  • Trip planner
  • Commute time filter (I.e. Show me all schools within a 30 minute commute of my home address)
  • Preference for link to existing or future apps

Tools and Maps

This is a collection of transit and school data tools:

Hacknight Projects

This is a listing of projects people are working on at the hacknight. You might find some ideas from our kick off night (see the About or from BetaNYC's ideascale. If you are going to be working on a project, edit this page and add it below.

  • Example - "Project name. Project description. Project Lead. Contact info."
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Data Sets

In general, you can find data on NYC.gov/data or NYC's APIs at NYC.gov/developers. The following list is a collection of relevant Gov and Non-Gov NYC datasets.

NYC Department of Education Data

MTA Data

Ferry Data

CitiBike Locations

Others

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