AAA
A Design-Based Research capstone project letting any student create and manage their own assignments on the site, while keeping the existing teacher tools and workflow untouched.
The problem
Only teachers and admins could make an assignment on this site. If a student wanted to run their own — for a club, a study group, or a peer project — they had no way to do it without asking an adult to create it and hand over control.
Assignment Creator Permissions
Our goal
Let any student make their own assignment right on the website, and let that student manage it — grade it, edit it, add helpers — without ever needing to become a teacher or admin.
Team · Aneesh Deevi, Aditya Srivastava, Aaryav Lal
Who can do what
| Action | Student | AI Grader | Creator | Admin |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| View & submit your own work | ● | ● | ● | ● |
| Suggest a grade (if assigned) | ○ | ● | ● | ● |
| Give the final grade | ○ | ○ | ● | ● |
| Edit assignment details | ○ | ○ | ● | ● |
| Add or remove a co-creator | ○ | ○ | ●* | ● |
| Delete the assignment | ○ | ○ | ● | ● |
* A creator can't remove the assignment's last remaining creator — only an admin can do that, so an assignment is never left without an owner.
What shipped
- Any signed-in student can create an assignment and becomes its owner
- An owner can add other students as co-creators of the same assignment
- Assignments made this way accept any type, due date, and point value — same as the older teacher-only workflow
- The older "assignment: true" frontmatter workflow still runs untouched
- The submissions page shows a creator a scoped "All Submissions" view of just their own assignments
Why it's safe
- Every rule in the table above is enforced on the server, not just hidden in the UI
- Permission is re-checked at the moment of the edit, closing a gap where access revoked mid-request could slip through
- Requests are checked against where they came from, blocking forged calls from outside the site
- Automated tests cover this, including one that tries to break it on purpose with two things happening at once
What's next
A planned category for assignments left without a creator (e.g. after account deletion), visible only to admins — not yet implemented.