Supporting studio-based design courses with django-courseapp

This document describes the development of a Django-based web application called Courseapp to support studio-based design courses. It was created in 2 weeks to address needs like individual/group assignments, grading criteria, and multimedia embedding for a 160 student HCI course. Django provided a clean object-relational mapper and templating system to build the app rapidly. Lessons learned include prioritizing student wants and making it easy for TAs to provide feedback. Courseapp is now open source and available online.