The Project Begins!

    As Computer Science majors at Augustana College, we are enrolled in a senior inquiry course to finish out our educational career at Augustana. The largest portion of the grade for this class is a project that we work on in teams. Our team is made up of Chase Fahy, Jason Palmer, and Mitchell Knollenberg. This week we put together our official team proposal for our chosen topic for our project, including a mock-up of the UI we would like to create, the rationale for the app existing, and some features the final product would have. 

     The project we would like to work on is an Android app that would allow Augustana students to leave ratings for courses they have taken in the past as well as leave ratings for professors they have takenclasses with. Our idea for an app name so far would be "Augie Course Connection". Our reasoning behind this idea is because students often like to leave feedback on a specific course or professor after they are finished with said course. This app would let them not only rate the course/professor, but it would also allow someone to search for a specific course or professor to see what to expect in a course they may be hoping to take.

    The app would also have a marketplace to buy and sell textbooks from other students. This is because students are often left with textbooks after they are done with a course that they may have difficulty finding a buyer for. The app would allow them to set up meetings and deals with other Augustana students to safely and easily exchange class materials. Finally, the app would also include forums for different classes where students can communicate with their classmates. This would allow them to help each other with difficult topics, find study groups, or maybe just chat about how the class is going for everyone. 

    We figured this would be a good place to start with Android app development, since our group members have no prior experience with Android development going in to the project. Also, the main idea of the application would be to connect Augie students with others in the courses they are taking, which is something we could have used during our time at Augustana College. Below are some slides from Powerpoint that we made to illustrate what the UI of our app would actually look like. It begins at a login screen where you would first enter your school email and password. Elements of the UI that are highlighted yellow indicate that button has been pressed in order to navigate to a new screen. From the login screen, the user logs on to see a leaderboard of the highest ranking professors. From there, the user can navigate to different tabs using the buttons at the bottom. For this example, the user navigates to the marketplace and explores the UI of the marketplace.




Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Improving the User Experience

Image
      This week we aimed to implement new features that would make navigating and using the functions of our app easier for our users. We removed the action bar from the top portion of our app and replaced it with the Android widget, toolbar. This gave us the opportunity to add a variety of buttons to the top banner of the app that will be accessible from any page or activity of Course Connection. We moved the sign out button from the main screen so we were able to save some screen space for other features in the future. After a bit of discussion we decided to leave this feature of the menu bar open ended. Currently it contains the sign out button and the "My Profile" button which will take you to a screen where you are able to view all of the ratings that you have left. In the future we may add more to this toolbar. The next pieces we added were a set of drop down menus so the user is able to sort reviews by their course code. This feature also assisted us in adding...
Read more

Week 7

Image
 We had a busy week in our Senior Inquiry course. This week we presented the final product of our individual projects to the class. Now that we have presented the individual projects, all of our attention can turn to the group project. Lately we have been working on integrating Google Firebase into our project. We managed to get the Firebase authentication functionality working for our project so now users sign into the app using a Google account. We also have some rules in place so that only Augustana students may log in since that is the intended audience for the app. This was relatively easy to implement since all Augustana students have emails that follow the same format with their email ending in the year they enrolled at Augustana followed by the Augustana domain name (as an example, consider xxx17@augustana.edu). Our first "sprint demo" will be on Thursday, April 22nd so we want to have a bit more functionality in our app by then. More than likely, we will be trying to...
Read more

Week 5

Image
 Progress on the app has been relatively slow the past few days. We are entering our Easter Break here at Augustana College so the group members have been more focused on getting some much needed time off from our classes than making huge amounts of progress on our app. We also had a bit of a mishap with Github merging that we had to remedy before moving forward. That being said, we have still been working diligently. This week we worked a bit more on the Fragment idea to make different tabs to navigate to within the app and we also have been working on integrating Google Sign In into our app. Google Sign In has been giving us some problems, but we managed to get it working for at least one group member's device. We are not  exactly  sure what the problem is that's causing the Google Sign In to fail on other devices, but in an attempt to remedy that, we have been looking into integrating Firebase into our app. Firebase seems like a logical next step since it offers so man...
Read more