# Build brief — a focused alternative to Educamos

> **Verdict:** Not faithfully · **Buildability:** 13/100 · **Category:** Education
> **Source:** https://www.canitbevibecoded.com/educamos
> Independent editorial assessment from Can It Be Vibe Coded? Not affiliated with, endorsed by, or derived from Educamos. Verify current pricing and capabilities before acting.

## Context

**Educamos** — School management and family communication platform used by K-12 schools, mostly in Spain and Latin America, covering grades, attendance, timetables and messaging.

This is not an app you own, it is the system of record your school runs on. The grades, attendance marks, timetables and official report cards live on the school's tenant, entered by teachers you do not employ, under student data rules you do not control. A personal replacement would have nothing authoritative to read from: there is no public API you can point at, and scraping a minor's school portal is a bad idea on several axes at once. Even if you rebuilt the parent-facing screens perfectly, the moment a teacher posts a notice it would appear in Educamos and not in your build. The honest DIY here is a private tracker that sits beside it, not a replacement for it.

This brief describes a focused, single-operator replacement for the part of Educamos that is genuinely reproducible. It is deliberately narrower than the product it replaces, and it says so in writing. Build the useful core; do not pretend to have rebuilt the rest.

## What you are building

A local family dashboard where you manually log grades, homework and school notices per child and get a simple trend view plus a weekly summary.

- Sequence lessons, check understanding, and track progress for one learner.
- A responsive interface with real empty, loading, success, and error states.

## Requirements

### Functional

- Node and a local SQLite file.
- Manual entry, or copy-paste from whatever the school actually sends you.
- Nothing else, no school system access.

### Non-functional

- Accessibility: semantic markup, labelled controls, visible focus, and reduced-motion support.
- Security: server-side secrets, validated input, and no credentials in the client bundle.
- Reliability: retries with backoff on external calls, and a clear failure state when a provider is down.
- Portability: the operator can export their data and leave without losing it.

## Implementation brief

Build a local-only family school tracker called Boletin. Single user, no accounts, no cloud.

Stack, no substitutions:
- Node 20, TypeScript, Fastify for the server
- SQLite via better-sqlite3, file at ./data/boletin.db, schema created on first run
- Server-rendered HTML with a single Pico.css CDN link, plus a little vanilla JS. No React, no build step beyond tsc.

Data model:
- child: id, name, school_year
- subject: id, child_id, name, teacher_name (optional), weight (optional)
- grade: id, subject_id, date, label, score, max_score, notes
- attendance: id, child_id, date, status (present, absent, late, excused), notes
- note: id, child_id, date, source (teacher, school, me), title, body, pinned boolean
- homework: id, subject_id, due_date, title, done boolean

Features, in scope:
- Child switcher in the header.
- Dashboard per child: current average per subject (weighted if weights set), homework due in the next 7 days, last 5 notes, absence count this term.
- Forms to add and edit every entity. Fast keyboard entry matters more than looks: one page per entity type with an inline add row at the top.
- Subject detail page with a plain SVG line chart of grades over time, no chart library.
- A weekly summary page rendered from the last 7 days of data, with a copy-to-clipboard plain text version.
- CSV import for grades: columns subject,date,label,score,max_score. Show a preview and a row count before committing.
- Export everything to JSON at /export, and a button that copies the SQLite file to ./backups with a timestamp.

Explicitly out of scope, do not attempt:
- Any connection to a school platform, no scraping, no login automation, no unofficial APIs
- Multi-user, invites, or messaging
- Push notifications, email, telemetry, analytics

Details:
- npm start runs the server on PORT from .env, default 3000. Commit .env.example only.
- Seed script with one fictional child and two subjects so the UI is not empty on first run.
- README: what this is, what it is not, and one blunt line saying grades must be typed in by hand because the school's system is the source of truth.

## Delivery standard

- Inspect the repository first, then write a short implementation plan before writing code.
- Deliver the smallest complete end-to-end workflow first; every primary control must work against persisted data.
- Use real validation and storage; never substitute fake dashboards, decorative controls, hard-coded success states, or mock integrations.
- Include responsive layouts plus genuine empty, loading, success, validation, and failure states.
- Keep secrets server-side in environment variables, provide .env.example, and never commit credentials or user data.
- Add structured logs around every external call and return actionable errors without leaking sensitive details.
- Write unit tests for the core logic and one automated test of the main user journey.
- Finish with a README covering setup, architecture, data location, backups, tests, deployment, and known limitations.

## Acceptance criteria

- [ ] A clean install starts the app using only the README and .env.example.
- [ ] The primary journey works from first visit through saved result, reload, edit, export, and deletion where applicable.
- [ ] Invalid input, missing configuration, provider failure, and an empty database each have a usable state.
- [ ] The interface works at 390px and 1440px, is keyboard navigable, and shows visible focus on every control.
- [ ] Tests, type checking, linting, and a production build all pass with no ignored failures.
- [ ] No part of the interface implies a live integration, security guarantee, or scale capability that was not actually built and verified.

## Non-goals

Do not build these, and do not claim to have replaced them:

- Authoritative data: teachers enter grades and attendance in Educamos, not in your app.
- Two-way messaging with teachers and the school office.
- Official documents: report cards, absence justifications, enrolment and billing flows.
- Timetable, room and substitution updates that come from the school's own scheduling.
- Everyone else on it: the school, other parents, the administration staff.

## What you still own after launch

- Run migrations, backups, restores, and dependency updates.
- Test the critical journey after every model, API, or hosting change.
- Monitor failures and fix the edge cases a first prompt will miss.
- Maintain every third-party integration as APIs and OAuth rules change.

## Risk

**High consequence.** Use this as a prototype or personal aid. Keep a qualified human and an established provider in the loop for consequential decisions.

Editorial confidence in this assessment: medium. No reviewed project implementation is linked yet.

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Generated by [Can It Be Vibe Coded?](https://www.canitbevibecoded.com) · Full report: https://www.canitbevibecoded.com/educamos