An app to welcome students to KAUST during the orientation period, and provide important information.
In August, new students will arrive for the Orientation period. Not only will they have to complete several mandatory processes, but they will find themselves taking in an almost overwhelming amount of information about the culture and life here.
This project will be in conjunction with Graduate Services and other relevant teams, and all programmers or designers are welcome to contribute. The goal here is to provide a smartphone app with a few useful features described below.
- A checklist of things that the student must do on the first day and subsequent days (housing, medical, bank, meet academic advisor, etc). It would nice for the students to be able to tick the boxes once they are done.
- A calendar of all events taking place during the Orientation period. An official one will be provided online, we just have to make it phone-friendly.
- An address book of important phone numbers. It would be ideal if the student can import all the important numbers (or the ones he/she wants) into the phone's address book at the click of a button.
- A set of web links to useful internet sites (collegiate link, facebook groups, etc).
- Travel guide and maps of the area, including KAUST, Thuwal, Jeddah and possibly beyond. The idea here was to create something based on Open Street Maps, and to use the remarkably detailed overlays provided at https://github.com/Virtakuono/.kml-repository . The maps can also be supplemented with travel information. This would be a great help to the newcomers, because even some of us who have been here several years still don't know much about what's beyond the walls.
Other things can be added, but it would be good to accomplish these tasks first before moving forward. Note that all of this information is already available to the students by other means, e.g. on websites and paper (although there could be long queues for students wanting to use the PCs in the student centre). So those without smartphones can still access all that. But above all the goal here is to encapsulate the important aspects in a portable way.
Operating Systems: We will target Android and iOS. If anyone thinks they can take on Windows Phone too, then by all means go for it, but otherwise we will stick to the most popular two. We should also try to target a wide range of versions, not just the new ones, because students who arrive here may have old phones.
Note: Perhaps it will be easier to write Android first and port to iOS.
Graphics: Some lightweight graphics will be good, but we don't want to over-do it. Keep the memory usage and battery consumption as low as we can. Some of us will need to draw up the designs for buttons, logos, maybe a welcome screen. Communications team will have requirements for the types of fonts and layouts to use.
This is a collaborative effort, anyone is welcome to work on the tasks and submit pull requests (spread the news to friends who might be interested!). Find a task you want to work on, and assign youself to it (or create a new task). It would help to also make a comment about what you did. Attach screenshots if you can.
For those who do not code, you can also discuss on the issues page. Not all the discussions there will be code-specific, you can still discuss ideas about the app in general.
Any questions, please post in the Issues page or email me at liam.mencel@kaust.edu.sa
Some screenshots of basic menus:
