In my second year at university, one of my modules was the Real World Project. This involved being part of a group of six members, who I didn’t know before the project, who were from varying courses. Our task was to think of an idea for a new product, research into how to create it and which software tool to use, design the system, and then to actually develop it ourselves to implement our design.
For our idea, we decided to create a smartphone application to help students with revision and make revision more enjoyable. The main idea for our app was that students were sent notifications of questions relating to their course randomly throughout the day, to keep them reminded of their lecture’s material. To develop the application we used Android Studio and had a working prototype at the end of the project.
The above pitch video was the final submission for our assignment and was used to demonstrate our prototype, as well as allowing us to discuss our contributions to the project.
I was the project leader for this task and so had to overlook all aspects of the project, ensuring all deadlines were met. This involved having good time management skills, being very organised and establishing clear communication within my group for the entire project. I had to put in the extra effort to meet all the goals I set out for the group to do and make sure every one was clear on what was expected. I tried to go the extra mile – not just because I was the group leader but because I wanted it to be clear to the rest of my group the quality of work I wanted us to produce. It was a valuable experience being group leader for a project like this, as the whole module was set up to be like what it would be like in a real world software development team. However, I did have to deal with issues during this project, such as no communication from my group for periods of time, or some not completing their share of the work in time.
My other contributions to this project was firstly the project management. We carried out weekly meetings between the group, I set out a project plan and gantt chart for us to try to meet, and I conducted market research towards the beginning of the project. For the system design and planning stages, I set out the requirements specifications that we needed to develop for the app, I created the UML diagrams (such as the use case, class, and sequence diagrams), and I also created the concept drawings for how our app should look. In the software development stages I was focused on the notification that users would receive for the questions relating to their course/lectures. This was the unique idea of our app so it was important this part was done correctly. I also created the interfaces for how users would interact with the courses and modules for their university within the app, and how users could create courses/modules to customise their experience.
The video along with this post has a much better overview of how the app would be used by students, and was the actual submission for this module. If it was possible I would have liked to have carried on with this project beyond it being just a prototype, as developing a smartphone application was very enjoyable for me.
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