Ballast: Coding 101 (THE OUG SERIES)

Five first-year students inherit a program that decides who needs help. The code works. Nobody knows why.

Priya, Deniz, Noor, Ola, and Mateo have ten weeks and Ballast: a student-built early-warning prototype that reads attendance, submissions, and engagement, and hands someone a list of names. Buried inside it sits a number, 0.65, the line between a quiet week and a flagged one, marked validated in pilot by people who graduated years ago.
Rebuilding it will teach them to program. Trusting it is the other education, because the closer the funding demo gets, the clearer it becomes that the hardest questions were never technical. Who owns a number nobody chose? Who runs the report once this is real? And what do you owe the person a score points to, when the score belongs to someone you know?

Underneath the code is a story about being seen. Universities and algorithms both turn complicated lives into records: attendance, submissions, scores, categories, histories. Ballast asks what those records can tell us, and why human judgment still matters when the technology works exactly as designed.

Set in the same world as Human Parade.