How it works
One project, first question to permanent record
SciPath follows a project while it happens, so nobody has to reconstruct its history the week before it is due.
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Register the project
A question, the people working on it, and the program it belongs to. That is enough to start. Everything after this hangs on a project that exists.
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Follow the path the program sets
A class, a fair, a journal and an independent project each ask for different things at different times. The dates, forms, deliverables and limits that apply to yours are on the project page, resolved from the program you joined.
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Keep the record while you work
Dated notes, files, links, decisions and observations, appended as the work happens. A wet lab student photographs a notebook page. A software student pastes a commit summary. Both satisfy the same requirement.
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Prepare and take part
Assemble what the program asks for, then record what happened: the entry, the presentation, the placement, the award, the feedback. A season leaves evidence rather than a memory.
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Publish the result
Finished work becomes a public record with a stable address, a citation, named authors and a stated contribution. It resolves years later, which is the point of it.
Approval before experimentation
Forms that must be signed before work begins are checked against the date the work actually started. Getting that order wrong disqualifies students every year, and no reminder catches it reliably.
Limits somebody else enforces
An abstract over the word limit and a board over the size limit are refused at the fair, so they are shown as limits here, at the moment somebody is working on the thing.
Everything else is a warning
A step out of order or a late deliverable is recorded and never blocked. Software that refuses to record what happened gets lied to, and is then holding a tidy fiction.
SciPath organizes research. It does not do the research. It writes nothing, grades nothing, ranks nobody against anybody, and computes no readiness score. It does not read the documents a student links to, and no student work trains a model.
It also has no authority over a fair or a school. It did not set the deadline and it cannot grant an exception. What it can do is put the rule in front of somebody while they are working, and keep the evidence that they met it.