Final Results
A Mobile App for Carleton's Sesquicentennial
Advisor: Jeff Ondich
Background
During the 2016-2017 school year, Carleton will be celebrating its sesquicentennial.
Stephen Mohring of the Studio Art department is on the sesquicentennial planning
committee, and he wants an app to help people explore Carleton's history.
I sat down with Stephen for five minutes to talk about a few ideas for this app. I filled three pages with notes, and I think I hurt my hand. Here's a sample:
- An app-enhanced walking tour of the campus, with historical information available depending on (roughly) where you are at the time.
- Browsable, searchable library of images...
- ...and audio oral histories...
- ...and video from convocations with famous people...
- ...and hand-written journals called "memory books" that were handed out to freshmen early in the 20th century, and meticulously filled out for four years...
- ...and so on for all sorts of other materials from the Carleton Archives.
- A history scavenger hunt, with clues taking you around campus learning history as you go.
- A "magic mirror like in Romper Room" where you can look through your phone and see what the campus looked like in 1900 or 1940 from where you're standing. (Blame Stephen for that reference understood only by children of the 1960s and their parents.)
- etc. etc. etc.
For this project, you will build an app to support the celebration of Carleton's first 150 years. The app will be deployed to real live people in September 2016.
The Project
This project will involve:
- Working with Stephen Mohring to develop a master list of possible features. You will probably also want to consider focus groups or some other way of exploring the gigantic space of possibilities for this app and identifying those items that people might find most interesting and helpful.
- Working with the College Archives office to identify sources of data to be incorporated into the app. (Note that the sesquicentennial committee has a budget, some of which could be spent for professional digitization services.)
- Developing a software architecture (including both client and server sides) to support a large variety of features.
- Developing a UI design for the same purpose.
- Developing testing plans (both correctness and usability) to ensure high quality, since the software, once deployed, will reflect on Carleton as a whole.
- Working with relevant ITS and/or Web Services staff to arrange hosting of the server side and to develop a suitable security model for the app.
- Implementing as many of the highest priority features as time allows.
A couple of the challenges to keep in mind:
- You will have to decide early whether to focus narrowly on phone vs tablet, and iOS vs Android. Any choice will have significant implications for the project as a whole.
- As with any exciting software project, there will be way more good ideas than time available to implement them, so planning for future development will be important.
- Some of the location-based features will be limited by the accuracy of location data coming from the mobile devices. (Fortunately, the kinds of features Stephen is talking about don't require great accuracy.)
Prerequisites
There are no specific prerequisites for this project, other than being a CS major doing comps. That said, it would be great if the team included people with experience in some of the following:
- Mobile app development (e.g. via taking CS342)
- Usability design methodology (e.g. via taking CS344)
- Graphic design (e.g. via relevant Studio Art or CAMS classes)