Project Examples
Here are some examples of projects that have been developed by Hyland's high school interns.
Summer 2025: Hyland Tech Outreach Portal
This is our current internship. Students are working on this project as we speak!
It is deployed and semi-functional, though we are still in the testing phase. It is meant to be a simplified online IDE akin to JsFiddle, CodePen, Replit, VS Code for Education, Glitch, StackBlitz, or many other things like that. It is using the MERN stack in a pretty straightforward way. Here is the repository:
Of all the projects we have offered, this has the most potential value-add for our team. It could really change the way our classrooms operate, and provide us with a much more sustainable and maintainable tool moving forward. I architected it and provided a mostly-working prototype at the beginning, and the students are now in the process of running with it. Hopefully by August it will be up-and-running!
Summer 2024: AUTOHACK IDLE
This project sort of saw the light of day, but did not live too far beyond last summer.
It is deployed and functional, but was never quite ready for live classroom usage. It is an incremental game designed to help students learn more about computer science. It was built using React and Phaser (a game development framework), and did not really have much of a backend. Here is the repository:
The team worked really well together, and learned a lot. They had almost complete ownership over the direction of the project, which sometimes meant focusing on features about which they felt personally passionate.
Summer 2023: Friendivia
This was the first project that actually ended up seeing the light of day! It is currently a little broken for two main reasons:
- The free version of Render takes a few minutes to load up
- The free text-to-speech API we used has started malfunctioning
However, it was working in 2023 and 2024, and we used it in a variety of our classrooms to great success. It is an online social icebreaker game where players have to answer questions about their peers. It was built using the MERN stack, and heavily utilizing sockets to communicate between the frontend and the backend. Here is the repository:
The team was 100% in-person, and worked well together. I handed them an almost-working prototype version of the application, with the architecture completed, and they ran with it. Throughout the summer, I continued to actively develop the project alongside them. We actually managed to deploy the project using Render, and even purchased a domain name. Ultimately, this was our most successful internship project.
Summer 2022: UCT Locator
For this team's project, we worked with a real-life stakeholder from Inspired Access Foundation. Our hope was to build a web application where caregivers could locate accessible adult changing tables. This is the first time we used the MERN stack, and we created a single repository for the project:
Unfortunately, we were unable to complete the project by the end of the summer. We had a less experienced mostly virtual team, so even though I was doing some active development for the project, we were not able to hand it off in a working state. We also never even tried to deploy it. Another developer did end up taking over after our internship ended.
Summer 2022: Student Profiles
Simultaneous to the UCT Locator project, another team was working on another web application. This was meant to be a way for my team to track students in our programs, with profile creation, program sign-up, and more. It did not have a separate front-end - it was all done with Node.js, Express, and EJS for templates. Here is the repository:
This team was mostly in-person, and they worked really well together to add features to the application. However, there was not much oversight over their work, and by the end it was pretty messy. We also made no attempt to deploy it, so it did not amount to much for us (though it did teach us a lot).
Summer 2021: Hackathon Application
For this virtual internship, the team decided on the project they wanted to do (a hackathon student portal), as well as the tech stack (Python+Django+React). They did almost everything themselves! They split the project into two repositories - a front-end and a back-end:
Ultimately, they did not create a fully-functioning final product.