Virtual Campus Tour
How it Began
Normally, the groups are given a list of project ideas to bring to life, but our group leader is quite an ambitious individual, and she wanted to create a virtual campus tour. She said that our campus doesn’t have a site where prospective students can go to get a better idea of what life at our campus is like, and that she thought that it would be really helpful for them. It seemed like a very daunting task, but we all agreed to try it out and see how things went. We had a few discussions about what exactly we wanted - like a map feature or 360 degree images. As time went on we realized that it would be extremely difficult to implement everything our leader had first envisioned, so we kept simplifying it until we got to something that was possible within the time frame we were given.
What It Is
A user of our site can see general information about UH Manoa like dining areas, study areas, financial information, etc. Also, it has information about the ICS department, like clubs and research projects. Currently, we only have information about the ICS department, but our end goal (beyond this class) was to expand it to a list of different colleges (like the College of Natural Sciences) with a list of their departments (like adding the Biology department to the College of Natural Sciences).
My Contributions
Early in the development phase, we weren’t very sure what we wanted our site to be, so I and another member spent a lot of time thinking about and drawing out what features we wanted, how they would work, what pages there would be, and what they would generally look like. I also did most of the work relating to the database. Our site has a feature where logged-in users can add or remove clubs associated with themselves, and see a page that shows info cards for the clubs associated with them, similar to a “favorites” feature. Administrators are also able to add new clubs and edit existing ones.
What I Learned
The main thing I learned from this project is how to work in a group. It requires a lot of time, planning, and communication to all be successful.