This week, we’re revisiting our STEAM concepts from Week 2. We were asked to generate 10 solutions to our problem and create 1 prototype. My problem was about storing student pronouns in an easy and safe way.
My creative process for this week was quite simple as all I really needed to come up with was a way to store student details in general. This comes from my belief that pronouns can be stored as easily as names – and thus this lack of extemely simple implementation makes trans students invisible, for like no reason. Now, if you’re at a school where the cruelty isnt the point, SIMS (registration software used in a majority of UK primary and secondary schools) came out with a new update as of July 5th, 2022. You can read more here. https://faq.scomis.org/kb704626/
This system isn’t perfect, as all it stores is pronouns, has no supplementary details (as pronouns can be a whole story, not just a set of words!) so I seeked to improve upon this by atemping to intergrate a dedicated table for pronoun safety instead of a restricting dropdown box. That being said, SIMS suprised me with its use of neopronouns, however I believe selecting neopronouns from a dropdown box defeats the purpose of even having them there – neopronouns can be unpredictable. I believed that can be fixed by simply changing the data type for this column to plain text instead of drop-down. But first, we need to find a solution to store these details.
- Microsoft access database
- Paper-based database
- Heap TXT files
- Excel flat-file spreadsheet
- Hash tables, for privacy ##### (javascript implementation)
- Just say it! Use ur brain to remember! Have it known by word of mouth.
- Binary tree methods (javascript implementation)
- Look into possible apps- Microsoft SQL
- MySQL
- SIMS (what was used at my school)
To be sensible, I added a new table to the Microsoft access preset database for schools, titled Student Pronouns.
Now, apart from ID, all the fields in this table in long text form. This is due to the unpredictable nature of pronoun storage. This way we can accomodate both cisgender students using their birth pronouns and having no supplementary details, as well as any other student that may or may not be trans but uses alternate pronouns, or has a complex list of usable pronouns and a very specific list of people they are comfortable using them around.
This table also has a relationship to the main student table meaning this information is easily available.
I think my prototype needs to be refined further however as there are features I want to implement that prevent this from being perfect, namely pronoun privacy.
Above all else, people under this system need to be kept safe and be respected. I think data should be hidden or changed when viewed by certain accounts as specified by the user in order for them to have complete control and choice as to who sees what in regards to their gender identity.
My week 2 blog post
To reflect, I haven’t implemented a way to change certain records depending on the user that views them. After implementing this change, I think this system would be much closer to my original vision. Ways i could do this would maybe be creating another table just to store privacy related discrepancies and how they are supposed to display (and to whom), but I don’t know how to do that myself yet in Access. The most useful way these tables would be used are in SIMS, but I think it’s closed source and I have no access to it to make a modified prototype.