Chicago Summer of Learning

Learning happens everywhere in the city—in libraries, parks, museums and cultural institutions, community-based organizations, colleges and universities, schools, and beyond. This summer, Mayor Rahm Emanuel is challenging all Chicago youth to participate in the Summer of Learning, a citywide effort to engage youth in hands-on learning opportunities—particularly in science, technology, engineering, arts, and math. School stops for the summer, but learning never should.

More than 100 organizations across the city have joined forces to integrate learning into summer activities for youth of all ages in every Chicago neighborhood.

This is the code that makes all that possible

Overview

The CSOL site depends on two backend services, OpenBadger to issue the badges and Aestimia to assess online learning. All three applications are written in Node.js and use Express as a web framework. CSOL uses MySQL as a data store, while OpenBadger and Aestimia use Mongoose. We also use the really excellent Mandrill to send emails via their API, and Amazon S3 to host uploaded work.

Each app is developed with Heroku's 12 factor app structure in mind. The entire environment is hosted on Amazon EC2, but is highly portable.

Get Involved

There's a lot of organizations involved with launching the Chicago Summer of Learning, the Chicago Mayor's Office, the MacArthur Foundation, the Digital Youth Network and the Mozilla Foundation, plus 100+ organizations offering youth opportunities to learn this summer.

Our code is open source, because we want this to be a community driven project. If you're interested in the goals of this project - we'd love your contributions.

Contributing is relatively easy,

1. Set up a development environment. Each app is Node.js, so if you're familiar with the firing up a Node app, you're in good shape. All configuration is passed to the app via environment variables, see below for how to define your environment.
2. Fork the code.
3. Find an issue to work on. We're actively marking issues that should be easy to grab as a first or second ticket as onboarding.
4. Work on the issue in your fork.
5. When you're done, submit the code as a pull request to the main repository (master branch). We'll review it and merge it asap!
6. GOTO step 3

If you want to tackle a bigger ticket, find a core developer and ask them what to work on. We hang out in IRC at irc.mozilla.org in the #badges room. Core devs include cmcavoy, arhayward, mlarsson, atul and brianloveswords. Any of those irc folks will be able to direct you towards meatier issues.

Environment

These variables should be configured in your applications environment through env variables. An easy way to do that is create a config.env in your application directly that looks something like,

#MySQL Config
export CSOL_DB_PASS=db

#Local Config
export COOKIE_SECRET='chris is cool'
export CSOL_HOST='chicagosummeroflearning.org'


#Location of OpenBadger
export CSOL_OPENBADGER_URL='http://localhost:8000/v2/'
export CSOL_OPENBADGER_SECRET='lecarre'

#Amazon S3
export CSOL_AWS_FAKE_S3_DIR='csol-s3'

#Aestimia
export CSOL_AESTIMIA_URL='http://localhost:8001'
export CSOL_AESTIMIA_SECRET='lksdafjjtitiejrwejjjresfs'
export CSOL_HOST='http://chicagosummeroflearning.org'

#Mandrill
export CSOL_MANDRILL_KEY=''

Then you can source the file like . config.env.

Here's the full list of variables,

Property	Default	Description
CSOL_DB_NAME	"csol"	Name of the database.
CSOL_DB_USER	"root"	Database username.
CSOL_DB_PASS	null	Database password.
CSOL_DB_HOST	null	Database host.
CSOL_DB_PORT	null	Database port.
CSOL_AWS_KEY	null	AWS key (for storing uploads)
CSOL_AWS_SECRET	null	AWS secret
CSOL_AWS_REGION	null	AWS region (optional)
CSOL_AWS_BUCKET	null	AWS bucket
CSOL_HOST	null	Canonical CSOL host (eg http://chicagosummeroflearning.org)
CSOL_EMAIL_DOMAIN	null	Domain to send email from (if different from CSOL_HOST)
COOKIE_SECRET	null	Seed for session cookie.
CSOL_OPENBADGER_URL	null	Openbadger API Location, http://obr.com/v2/
CSOL_OPENBADGER_SECRET	null	A shared secret with Open Badger. Should match the OPENBADGER_JWT_SECRET variable on open badger
CSOL_MANDRILL_KEY	null	The Mandrill key to use for mailings.
CSOL_AESTIMIA_URL	null	Aestimia API Location
CSOL_AESTIMIA_SECRET	null	A shared secret with Aestimia

Note that instead of providing AWS credentials, you can specify a pathname in CSOL_AWS_FAKE_S3_DIR. This is for development purposes only, and will store all uploaded files in the local filesystem instead of S3.

Database

The database can be sync'd by running

npm run-script sync-db

Any migrations can be run with

npm run-script migrate-db