January 6, 2000
The whole story starts in the spring of 1997 at Montgomery Blair High School in Silver Spring, MD. First, to clarify a few things, Blair has two "magnet" programs for talented students. One of these programs is called the CAP (Communications Arts Program) and the other program is the Blair Math/Science/Computer Science magnet. At that time, a CAP junior, Ben Krefting (who is now at Univ. of MD) was working on a project called the "Change Project" for media and communications teacher Chris Lloyd. The point of the assignment was to come up with an project to bring about change in some area. Ben's (and his group's) idea was to create a web-based system for educational collaboration for the CAP program at Blair. The assignment was to just generate and plan the idea, not actually implement it. However, Ben was excited about making the prospect a reality, and thus in June, he sent out a call for help to make the idea happen. I responded to his email, because I had a good amount of web and CGI experience (I was a sophomore at the time). The idea sounded neat, so that summer I began work on "CAPOnline". It was meant as a special purpose application for Blair, served over the web, where each class in the CAP program (about 20 of them) would have a web page that could be automatically updated. The page would have automated discussion forums and a class calendar. Since I was the only one involved that had much technical knowledge, I was writing all the code for this. It was written in shell script, was very slow, and was difficult to read. However, it was quick to develop, because shell script can get you pretty far with a few lines. That fall (of 1997) enough of the system was ready that we created accounts for all the CAP students (200 or so) and allowed them onto the system. Throughout that school year, CAPonline became fairly popular with the students and teachers in that group and was well used. Also, I was continually adding features such as some special administrative functions to organize the student run TV/radio station in the CAP Program, WBNC. A simple web-based e-mail utility was built-in that would allow communication between CAPonline users. CAPonline is still accessable at http://cap.mbhs.edu/ (you can login with username: guest, password: caponline) but is getting phased out. Another major player at the time was Ivan Askwith, who set a lot of vision for the project with ideas of where it needed to go and what features it needed. He was in my graduating class and is now a freshman at NYU. At the time, we had a number of local media articles written up:
Since there was a lot of good publicity for CAPonline in those days, I decided that expansion was inevitable. The whole school wanted to use the system, and maybe other schools, and the current code could not handle a load of more than 20-30 classes and 400 or so people. So, in June 1998, I started coding AUC from scratch. I decided it needed to be fast, flexible, and customizable. Progress was slow because C isn't an efficient language to write in, but AUC was making progress. The school started using it slowly during the 1998-99 school year, and called it BEN (Blair Educational Network at http://ben.mbhs.edu). During that time I was the "Executive Director" for the Internet Division of BNC, the student-run TV/Radio station at Blair. BNC was the class period in which I could devote time to the deployment of AUC at Blair. I also had a team of students to help me. Chris Lloyd was the faculty advisor for the organization. Another important player here was Peter Hammond, the school's User Support Specialist, who was a genuine supporter and facilitator for the student-grown unix/sysop culture at Blair. With all this interest, the project gained a lot of momentum in that year. As a senior, I also saw it as my last year to make a big contribution. At the end of the year, the Blair baton was passed on to Jesse Kovach and Mark Forrer, who as seniors in the 1999-2000 school year, would be continuing AUC deployment at Blair, while I would continue development of the code in college. Ivan and I decided that we wanted to enter the ThinkQuest competition with the project. So we geared up for a public release of the code in August of 1999, when the contest deadline was. At that time, I released version 0.5 and 0.5.1. We didn't do well in the contest, largely because it is intended for educational content projects rather than educational technologies. Anyway, accepting that loss and moving on, I moved the web site to sourceforge in December 1999, and released version 0.6.0 on January 1, 2000. -David Moore © 2000, David Moore |
