The projects
- Statistics Start-Up
We have a large number of statistics courses offered through the math department here at UD. Bryan Crissinger has developed some SAS scripts which generate customized datasets for students in his classes to practice statistical analysis. Each dataset has unique characteristics to discourage cheating amongst students. A team from CISC 475 is building a backend interface to generate datasets. We need to build a user interface for these sets and a server-side API which interacts with the 475 code-base and a database. If done well this project will be used in statistics courses here at UD, and if done very well could be grown by a small team into a sellable product for other universities or possibly the college board (think AP statistics and schools working with the new common core). This project has a large potential impact here at the university and should probably accept SAKAI roster exports.
- Steve's Wedding DJ Memory Maker
My brother-in-law is breaking into the business of being a wedding DJ. This open-ended project is to build an engagement tool for guests at weddings. In the last decade disposable cameras became all the rage at weddings, but I say we build a smart-phone version. Build a mobile-friendly site which allows guests to take photos that would be shared, via a projector, throughout the wedding party. If they can vote on the next songs (and the DJ can populate the songs from say an iTunes list, Google Play, or Amazon Music list) then all the better. After the party a permanent site with thoughts from guests, the images they took, and the playlist could be stored at a custom URL. Again, if done well, this could be a sellable product, as almost any town has a set of well established DJs. You could even develop it into a crowd-DJed setup. This project has the potential to sprawl and grow or be concise and functional, it's largely up to you.
- Polar Expedition Data Visualization
A PhD student of History here at UD has painstakingly collated large amounts of data about Explorations of the Antarctic and Arctic. She has been collecting the data into a Desktop Application which makes pleasant visualizations but can't be easily shared with the committee. She would like some way to share the data, allow searches on the data, and to be able to update and add to the data.
The data is a list of nodes and a list of edges which "connect" nodes. The nodes come are either (a place, expedition, ship, or person (or anonymous crew member)). The edges link crew to ship, ship to expedition, expedition to place, etc. She has fairly low expectations of functionality but I see some opportunity to play with interesting data visualizations (d3 js anyone?) and the always valuable skill of scraping data into the format you want. It was mentioned that google earth tours of expeditions could be replicated, that sounded very cool. After a bagel-shop office hours meeting she had the following feature priority list:
My highest priorities of what I'd like this data to do:
- Be searchable
- Be able to filter data by: place, time, relative popularity levels (so, "please show me all the explorers who went on more than three expeditions")
- Visually reveal connections between explorers and crew members who served on multiple expeditions
- Visually reveal patterns in exploration demographics: where the most people went each year/decade
- Visually reveal danger of discovery expeditions: filter by those who didn't survive
- Be in a structure that lets me continue to edit it without requiring a computer science degree
- Links out to wikipedia pages about expeditions
- Links to googlebooks editions of expedition journals
- Links to New Zealand Antarctic Heritage Trust, Fram Museum, Scott Polar Research Institute, AINA, etc.
- GoogleEarth tours of expedition routes
- Seaford Bowling Lanes: Bowling Ball Drilling Project
The family owned seaford lanes has boxes and boxes of these forms:
Which are used when a customer buys a new ball (the leagues are a big deal). They need a simple database to store the data, and a web-enabled input-screen which has roughly the right shape as the finger measurements you see. They would like to be able to look up previous orders by customer. This project will be an exercise in business UX, CSS, and database design. Getting the interface to have the right feel and make sensible choices for a smooth
workflow. I do think that small business projects like this have the tendency to be needed in every small town (the systems that automate this sort of data currently are only part of large-scale bowling suppliers, the do it yourselfers don't have a quick solution). Also the project seems like it is a good next step for this class.
A scan of the form front and the form back.
An Email from the Owner, attachements as links below This is the information you requested, plus I attached scanned documents with what needs to be on it.
1) needs to be confidential and secure
2) Search bar to search by name --When name search is done, it would be beneficial if the results showed ball type and date.
3) On scanned document that had VISE at the top, the side with name, date, etc..., that can all be free text for those blocks.
4) I wrote notes on the page to show what is needed in each block or text area.
4.5) All arrows on the page need to be a selection box or way to chose which arrow. (For each arrow pair select one of the two directions: either up or down OR left or right)
5) The ability to tab from one block to the next would also make it easier.
6) At the bottom of the page, I would like to have a free text area just like the scanned document that says: ball, weight, pin, layout, BH position, BH size, etc and then the notes section.
7) The last scanned document was provided for the Seaford Bowling Lanes logo, address and telephone number.
Thank you and also thank the class for taking on this task