Progressive Web Apps (PWAs) have come a long way since their early days as “just a fancy bookmark.” Today, they blur the line between native apps and web experiences—loading instantly, working offline, sending push notifications, and even appearing in your home screen’s app grid. Yet one capability long reserved for native apps remained out of reach for PWAs: accessing folders on your device. Thanks to the emerging File System Access API, that’s changing—at least on Android.

Why Folder Access Matters

Imagine a mobile sketching app that saves your projects directly into a “Sketches” folder you already use in Google Drive. Or a lightweight PDF annotator that writes notes back to the very directory you organize your documents in. These seamless workflows are familiar in desktop web apps; with folder access on mobile, they become possible in PWAs too.

Until recently, web apps on smartphones could only prompt users to pick …

Every generation promises to “change the world,” yet our classrooms remain eerily familiar: rows of desks, chalkboards or whiteboards at the front, lectures handed down from on high. Meanwhile, outside the school walls, artificial intelligence is reshaping industries, accelerating discovery, and personalizing experiences at scale. It’s time we ask ourselves: why are we still forcing children to learn in a format built for the 19th century, when AI-powered tools can teach them faster, smarter, and more engagingly than any one-size-fits-all curriculum?

1. The Slow March of Traditional Education

Traditional schooling is bound by schedules, standardized tests, and rigid curricula. A class of 30 students moves at the pace of the median learner—slowing down advanced students and rushing those who need more time. Concepts are introduced according to an arbitrary timeline, not when each child is ready to absorb them. As a result:

• Boredom and Frustration: Gifted children grow restless repeating …

Overview of SPA Concepts and Django's Role

A Single-Page Application (SPA) is a web application that provides a fluid, desktop-like experience by loading a single HTML page and dynamically updating content without full page reloads. Instead of the server delivering a new HTML page for each navigation, the SPA loads data asynchronously (e.g. via AJAX/fetch) and updates the existing page’s DOM using JavaScript. As a result, after the initial page load, further interactions fetch content or data in the background and inject it into the page, giving a seamless experience to the user. This contrasts with traditional multi-page applications where each click triggers a full page refresh from the server.

In a typical modern SPA, frontend frameworks like React, Vue, or Angular handle routing and rendering on the client side, and the backend (like Django) often serves a JSON API. However, you can build an SPA using just Django templates …

Introduction

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is becoming a valuable ally for engineering educators and researchers. Rather than focusing on theory or ethics, this overview highlights practical applications of AI in everyday teaching and research tasks. University-level engineering professors can leverage AI tools to automate routine work, personalize learning, and accelerate research breakthroughs. The following sections outline how AI is used for teaching (grading, content creation, personalized learning, lab simulations, student engagement) and for research (data analysis, simulation/modeling, literature review, writing support, workflow optimization), with real-world examples and platforms.

AI in Teaching

AI technologies offer tangible benefits in the classroom by reducing instructors’ workloads and enhancing student learning experiences. From grading automation to intelligent tutoring, professors can adopt these tools to improve efficiency and student outcomes. Key applications include:

AI-Assisted Grading

• Automated answer grouping: Tools like Gradescope use AI to cluster similar responses so that instructors can grade one representative answer and …

When integrating Django REST Framework (DRF) with a traditional Django template, you can use JavaScript (via the Fetch API or jQuery AJAX) to call your DRF API endpoints. This guide provides step-by-step examples and covers important considerations like CSRF tokens, authentication, relevant settings/middleware, and best practices.

Overview of the Approach

In a typical setup, your Django app renders an HTML template, and that page includes JavaScript which calls DRF endpoints (usually returning JSON). If the page and the DRF API share the same domain and session, you can leverage Django’s session authentication for AJAX calls. If the API is hosted on a different domain or meant for third-party clients, you’ll likely use token-based authentication instead. In either case, you must handle CSRF protection for any “unsafe” HTTP methods (POST, PUT, PATCH, DELETE) when making requests from a Django template.

Below, we’ll walk through examples using both the Fetch API …

django-chunked-upload is a Django add-on (a “Django app”) that makes it easy to upload very large files by splitting them into smaller pieces, or chunks. Instead of sending one giant file all at once, the browser sends many smaller parts to the server. The library then stitches these chunks back together. In practice, this means a user can resume an upload if something goes wrong – for example, if the network drops, they don’t have to restart from zero. In fact, the library’s description says it “enables users to upload large files… in multiple chunks, with the ability to resume if the upload is interrupted”. One blog explains the idea simply: “you break a file into chunks, and upload them separately instead of the entire thing in one go”. Django-chunked-upload automates this process on the server side so you don’t have to write all the logic yourself.

Why chunked …