During the 2016-2017 school year, Carleton College will be celebrating its 150th anniversary

As part of this celebration, the Sesquicentennial mobile app will guide users through an exploration of the college’s rich and unique history, as well as provide social networking features to bring users together in this remarkable occasion. The app’s ultimate purpose is to serve as an interactive guide that enables visitors to the college to immerse themselves in Carleton’s past and present through interactive features, while offering practical resources to navigate today’s campus. Designed for a wide audience, including alumni, parents, prospective students, and general college visitors, the app is available for both Android and iOS devices. The features that are provided with the app are described below.

History

The History section includes a view of Carleton’s campus through the years, offering up historical content depending on the user’s location.

Events

The Events section lists all Carleton-related events happening both on and off-campus.

Quests

The Quests feature provides an interactive way of exploring the campus. After selecting a quest, you must decipher a series of clues by determining what location on campus they refer to. After walking to that location on campus, the app will detect your location on campus and let you know if you are at the correct location. Hints are provided in case you get stuck!

Memories

The Memories feature allows you to explore photos that other users have uploaded to the app based on their location both on and off campus. You also have the feature of uploading your own photo memory for others to see. Whether you’re dancing in Sayles or at a cafe in Edinburgh on your Carleton study abroad trip, share those moments with fellow Carls by creating a memory!

The Project

There were some parts of this project that came up again and again during development. These were the most challenging, but often the most interesting aspects of this project.

  • Cross-Platform

    Building this app for both iOS and Android meant adhering to the respective standards and conventions of the Android and iOS platform. The main design difference between the two platforms is navigation. On the iOS side, the main menu appears at the bottom, while the menu appears at the top for Android phones to avoid interfering with the physical buttons present at the bottom of Android phones.

  • Location-Based

    One of the largest design decisions that made this app unique was the extensive use of location to interact with the app and filter content. From the history feature, where the landmarks nearby will show up on the map, to the quest feature, where you need to walk to the location you think the clue is pointing to, location is used to get users exploring campus.

  • Server Development

    Since we were developing for two platforms and many devices, there needed to be a common source of data. This came in the form of a Node server that was built to host the historical content, images and quest information. The server sends JSON to the app, which parses the data and displays the historical information, quest clues and photos, and events calendar information as needed.

  • Maintainability

    Since this app (and its code) are meant to stick around after the Sesquicentennial celebration, we needed to ensure that the code we left was well documented and easily modifiable to suit the future needs of the project after we're gone. This goal shaped much of the development of the project, from providing feature "modules" to providing a sensible API design for future developers.

  • User Testing

    This app will reach a wide audience during the Sesquicentennial festival, and accordingly, we needed to make sure that it made sense to our users, the students and alumni of Carleton. Naturally, this led to several bouts of user testing, which guided development near the end of the project.

  • Carleton

    Since this app was catering to Carleton and its history, we ended up talking to a lot of people here at Carleton to help us out. From Matt Ryan and Mark Heiman at Web Services, who will continue the maintenance of the app backend, to Nat Wilson in Archives who got us excellent resources about the history of this campus, to Dave Flynn and Mike Tie in ITS, who helped us support a server for development, there were many at Carleton who helped us make this app a reality.

Thanks for taking a look!

You can download or view the source and learn more about the project here.