Marz – Prototype I Final Report: Campus App

Introduction:

We wanted to design a tool that helps campus-going individuals out with finding places within their university and organizing their college tasks. The Campus App is a smartphone application that uses fine GPS data to provide a map of campus for the user. It shows the user where they currently are located, as well as buildings and interesting locations on campus that they might be looking for. It will integrate with school schedules and events, providing nice social organization for any user.

Marz – Prototype I Final Report Campus App.jpg

At first we were thinking about coding pretty heavily with Android (directly coding the app to handle transactions), but we realized that platform portability would be so much better by implementing a web server. The app can then serve nearly as a glorified bookmark to a webpage that offers the services of the Campus App. In the future this will make it much easier to make the move over to supporting iPhone and other platforms.

We have no use for hardware being designed in this stage of prototyping. Our main goal here was to get a working server that provides GPS and other interaction with your phone/computer. The system was implemented by means of a free web host service, and tested entirely on our phones and computers. The software aspect is comprised of javascript, php, and a small amount of SQL and CSS. See the description section below for proper details of each software file.

Description:

We created an account on a free web host that provided MySQL and PHP. A table named school was created in the database to store basic information about the school.

id abbrev name latitude longitude zoom
1 wsu Wichita State University 37.7192 -97.2931 16
2 KSU Kansas State University 39.1998 -96.581 15
3 HU Harvard University 42.37242 -71.114 16

We then created 5 pages, index.php, menu.php, map.php, javascript.js and style.css. A meta tag for “viewport” is included in the header of each page to allow each page to scale properly in mobile device’s browser. The ID of the school is passed around in the URL which allows each page to load school specific data and features specific to that school.

Marz – Prototype I Final Report Campus App Schematic

index.php

Queries the datadase table school to gather a list of all the schools, and then outputs a link to the menu.php for that school

menu.php

Displays a set of buttons such as map, sports, events, courses, book store, etc… Only one of them works right now, and that is the map button. Each button will point to a module, which is implemented as a separate page. For example, map.php is the maps module. In each module, the menu.php is loaded in the background, and hidden. This allows the menu to be quickly toggled open without any load time. This is accomplished with javascript and CSS.

 

For more detail: Marz – Prototype I Final Report: Campus App


About The Author

Ibrar Ayyub

I am an experienced technical writer holding a Master's degree in computer science from BZU Multan, Pakistan University. With a background spanning various industries, particularly in home automation and engineering, I have honed my skills in crafting clear and concise content. Proficient in leveraging infographics and diagrams, I strive to simplify complex concepts for readers. My strength lies in thorough research and presenting information in a structured and logical format.

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