Week 1: Kickoff Team Aardvark Project on ACES App

Hello readers,

This is Tan from Team Aardvark! Our team consists of 4 members: Kevin, Megan, Tyler, and me. We started an Android project last week for our Computer Science Senior Inquiry class. The goal of the project is to publish an app that can help people use the ACES (Augustana College Express Service) easier and faster. This blog will be the place where we update the progress of our project.

Over the last weekend, I have researched about how ACES's system works. Basically, this is how ACES' system works now:
1. A student will call the dispatchers and let them know his/her ID.
2. The dispatchers will check if the ID is valid, then let the student know the waiting time.
3. The dispatchers then record the student information into an Excel sheet.
After discussing, I know that ACES' biggest concern now is to improve the correction of the waiting time the dispatchers tell the students, from that they can improve the services. Therefore, I think the  main focus of our app for now will be finding a way to calculate the waiting time of an ACES ride.

After that, I tried to draw a layout for our Aces app:




The first three screen will serve the Log-in Activity. Firstly, we will have the first screen to introduce the app and might be served as the waiting screen in the future if the app takes a long time to start. Then, we will use the Google Log-in to let the students log-in their account. Since Augustana emails are synced with Gmail, this will work well and we do not have to check the students ID.
After that students will see the "Main Screen", where they can choose the pick-up and drop-off points on the next screen, and by pushing "Request ACES" button, they can easily request a ride.
After the waiting screen, the app will let the students know if their requests are "Success", and let them know the waiting time. The students will have choices to "Cancel" the ride to go back the "Main Screen" or to wait for the ride.
After the ride, the app will have a Feedback screen, where the students can rate the service over 5-star-scale and let us know if there is anything we can improve the app. The students can choose to "Skip" or "Submit" the feedback. After that they will go back to the "Main Screen", where they can request another ride or log out.

This is the idea for the app for now. I think our main goal is to finish a simple version of the app, and then eventually update it to a more comprehensive application.

Thank you for reading!
Tan.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Week 5: Improving the Map and Dispatcher App

Image
Greeting readers, This week we worked on improving the map design and finishing the Dispatcher app functions. Megan and I mostly spent our time to work on the map to improve its functionalities and design. Firstly, we improved the design and the color of the map to make it looks more appealing and smooth. We also added the bounds for Augustana College area, so when the students choose the "out-of-bound" locations, the app will not let them to do so and notify them to choose the locations in bounds. If the students choose the "out-of-bound" location.. ..., the app will notify them. Furthermore, we added a button on a top right of the screen to recognize the Current Location of the rider. If it is in the Augustana College area, we will choose it as a Start Location, and find the actual address using the Latitude and Longtitude. If it is not in Augustana College area, we will notify the riders that they are not in the ACES service area. ...
Read more

Week 8 Completion and Future Plans

Image
Hello readers!! We have finally made it to the finish line of our ACES app.  Unfortunately, we are not able to continue perfecting our app for students on Augustana's campus.  In our last week we added an update time function to the dispatch app that allows the dispatcher to change the wait time if there was a mistake or a delay causing a major change in the wait.  We were also making sure our demonstration would run smoothly. We finished up this week with our presentation to the Computer Science department and it went well. Our apps worked without any issues.  We were able to finally show off all of our hard work from the last 7 weeks!!  If this project is to continue at a later time we had some suggestions on additions to the app.  1.  There should be a way to allow students to use the app without needing to allow location services(not all people are willing to give away their location) 2.  Indicate where the boundaries are at on the...
Read more

Week 4: Dispatcher App, Custom and More Accurate Addressing

Image
Welcome back readers, This week we worked to get the user app working in real time with a dispatcher app would use to speed up the processes of logging rides. Megan and Tan spent their time cleaning up the google maps page of the user app.  It is functional for rides that are requested with locations around campus with the auto complete feature.  They were also able to get the pins marked for the start and destination locations.(As displayed below)  Lastly we got all of the parameters finally on the display so the number of riders is now sent to the database. Once the ride is requested they are now sent to a page that displays how long it will take for their ride to come so for now we have a page that does not display a time.  Kevin and I created the layout for the dispatcher to allow them to view all the requested rides and to have the ability to add rides and remove the ride by clicking on them.  Once the ride has been requested it is sent to th...
Read more