These are your options for final projects. We'll assign one team (3-4 people) to each project. You should assemble your own teams (though if you request it, Jeff will help). By 5:00PM Monday, April 20, send Jeff an email including (1) your team members, (2) an ordered list of your top 4 project choices, (3) your preferred OS, and (4) any other information you consider relevant.
Reunion. Erin Updike, Assistant Director and Reunion Coordinator, Alumni Relations.
"Alumni Relations would like to have an app developed for reunion. Every year over 2600 alumni and friends come back to Carleton for Reunion. We hope that this app would work for all alumni attending reunion to be able to access the schedule and Carleton Information. We would like to be able to use this app year after year and update information in it. It is our hope that this app would allow alumni to be even more connected while at Reunion. If possible we would even try to use the app at this years reunion."
"The app that was created for NSW last year has a number of the essentials already created for what we would need for a Reunion app. However, we would like to continue upon that with additional features if possible. Some features we would like to add are: Being able to send push notifications, a faculty listing, map location device that can link to existing direction apps to give you walking directions, Locations to where departments are housed, Be able to add schedule events to your personal calendar, A where’s my friend locator if people are logged in, and be able to do photo uploads."
KRLX. Ibrahim Rabbani '16, CS major and KRLX IT Engineer. "KRLX is Carleton College's student run 24-hour radio station. Our website can be found at http://krlx.org/. A potential KRLX app would be able to pull articles from the website and display them in a readable way. It should also be able to integrate social media sharing options for the content. It should be able to show the schedule of radio shows, display which show is currently playing and have a playing history. Last, it should be able to play the stream that can be found at http://radio.krlx.org/."
Summer Academic Programs. Jeremy Updike, Director Summer Academic Programs and Summer Teaching Institute.
"The Summer Academic Programs (SAP) would like to develop an app for the Summer Teaching Institute. The Summer Teaching Institute is a group of workshops that are offered on campus for teachers that are going to or have been teaching Advanced Placement courses. These workshops are all endorsed by the College Board. We offer an institute the week after reunion that had 471 people in attendance plus 43 instructors in 2014 and then another smaller-scale institute in July that hosted another 200 teachers and 11 instructors. While some of these teachers have attended our institute in the past, many have never been to campus. In addition, we host many special events and try to send reminders to participants throughout the week. Finally, these teachers have the opportunity to earn graduate credit for the courses that they’re taking (this is the only graduate credit Carleton offers)."
"SAP would like an app that would allow us to communicate with STI participants throughout the week, post our events calendar, course schedule, interactive campus map (map location device that can link to existing direction apps to give you walking directions), ability to add institute events to their personal calendars, and maybe even the dining hall schedule/meals each day (not as important on the priority list). Most of the institute remains the same each year, so we would be able to update the events schedule and workshop room assignments each year. In addition, we would like this app to be adaptable for outside conferences to use. This would allow us to plug in their information and ability to communicate with participants in their conference. This would allow us to add on a charge for clients that may want an app, but do not have a large amount of resources to offer one for their conference. It also customizes it to Carleton’s campus."
"You will have the ability to work with two to three members from the SAP team if you select this project app. http://go.carleton.edu/summer"
Writing Center Appointments. Erik Warren, Program Assistant, Academic Support Center.
"Our idea for an App would be an App scheduler for the Writing Center Appointments. Currently we are using a database that we bought from Princeton. For background, I log in all of the appointment times at the beginning of each Term. Each appointment is associated with a specific Writing Consultant, giving Consultants access to only their appointments. I set up the appointments on a weekly schedule. Students can then log into the database with their student user name and password and make an appointment at a specific time convenient to them when a Consultant is working. There are also reminder emails that are sent out, and students can lose appointment privileges if they miss two appointments they scheduled within each Term. Security is key. As mentioned, each consultant can only edit their own appointment reports, and students cannot do any more than make an appointment."
"This is the database login page - https://writingcenter.carleton.edu/htdocs/home.php."
"This is the page on our website that has the link for making appointments - http://apps.carleton.edu/campus/asc/writingcenter/.
"It would be great if the App could allow students to see a mobile friendly schedule on their devices, make appointments, and receive notices about upcoming appointments. For the Consultants, it would be great if they could look at their schedule, maybe receive notices about upcoming shifts and even fill out appointment reports."
Registration regulations and procedures. Roger Lasley, Registrar.
"We have a lot of regulations and procedures and not many faculty or students are as familiar with them as they sometimes need to be. Is there some way to make searching for regs and procedures easier than it currently is for people who don't already know what item in the regulations and procedures table of contents pertains in a given situation?"
Two language-learning apps. Laura Goering, Professor of Russian. Laura has two project ideas, and is willing to work with two teams.
Laura also says: "Number 1 already exists in various forms. Number 2 does not as far as I know, and thus is more desirable." One other important piece of full disclosure up front: Jeff has already mocked up and scheduled development/marketing/deployment/sale of a version of number 2. It's a great project, but don't be surprised when Ultralingua releases its own version of such an app a few months later.
Heart-rate tracker. Ken Abrams, Associate Professor of Psychology.
"The app would be used to track the heart rate of participants in a psychology research study. In a nutshell, six participants will be wearing Polar heart rate monitors, and the app (placed on six different iPads) would need to a) track the number of heartbeats that participants experience across fixed time periods, and b) download the resulting data in the form of a .csv or .xls spreadsheet to Dropbox. (The heart rate monitors send data via Bluetooth.) Importantly, the app would need to be able to "lock in" to a particular heart rate monitor rather than grab data from the strongest signal it detects."
Interactive science lesson plans. Vayu Maini Rekdal '15, Biology and Chemistry major.
"In addition to my scientific interests, I love cooking -- but for me, these two are essentially the same thing. The interconnectedness between science and cooking is perhaps best represented in my organization, Young Chefs (http://youngchefsprogram.org), which uses cooking to teach scientific concepts and methods to underserved youth across Minnesota. We currently work in the Faribault and Northfield school districts, holding afterschool programming aimed at improving science and health education among disadvantaged middle school students."
"In addition to holding weekly classes, I work with two professors, Deborah Gross (chemistry) and Eric McDonald (science education) to develop a comprehensive, rigorous science-cooking curriculum that can easily be adopted by other educators. To date, we have 10 lesson plans, all of which have been tested and revised based on our experiences with over 50 middle school students, which means that they are adapted to real classroom settings. The lessons can be found here: http://youngchefsprogram.org/curriculum/lesson-plans/ . I suggest you have a look so you can see how comprehensive each lesson plan is."
"All lesson plans contain diagrams, symbols, demonstrations, suggested examples, and a main recipe that captures one of more central scientific concepts. I now want to integrate these lesson plans with technology, specifically thinking about ways build a mobile application to translate these into interactive lessons that students can use on their smartphones or iPads (which are increasingly common in traditional classroom settings). The lessons would include recipes, lab notebook features, pictures, photo albums of experiments, etc."
Four geology education apps. Sarah Titus, Associate Professor of Geology (with help from Josh Davis, mathematician/computer scientist and man about town).
Carleton energy usage. Martha Larson, Manager of Campus Energy and Sustainability.
"I would indeed love for a group to take that wind / energy project a step further if there's student interest in working with that Lucid data via the API."
"The iPhone app came close to exactly what I wanted, but I think there were still some tweaks to be made to how they calculated their data. It also was on a 24 hr delay (or something like that). I think the real fun of a "how much wind power" app is to be outside feeling a windy day, pull out your phone, and know exactly at that moment how much of our campus power is coming from wind."
"The Apple group also took a shot at bringing some of the other building energy data into a mobile app (water, electricity, steam). I suppose a second group could also do more with that if we needed to add more meat on the bone. There are some basic energy use comparison reports that Lucid doesn't yet provide, so there's room for development using their existing API."