Capstone Project Kickoff!

Today marks the beginning of the first Sprint for my CS467 Online Capstone project with my teammates. I’m in a group with two other students who I have worked with before in the Software Engineering II course. Having already been in a group with each other is great since we know what our strengths and weaknesses are. Everyone is responsive and responsible which is very fortunate since I have been in bad groups, finishing up my final term at OSU with this amazing group will make the journey to graduation pleasant.

For our Online Capstone project, we chose to develop a Teacher Supply Donation Web Application. This was an idea proposed by one of my teammates who has been working in education. Here is a little background regarding the idea and the purpose of the Web App as stated in our Project Plan:

In the US K-12 education system, school budgets are often insufficient to cover classroom supplies that teachers need to conduct the activities that would most facilitate student learning. As a result, many teachers compensate by buying supplies themselves or seeking donations from students and their families. To help make this donation process convenient and efficient for both teachers and students, our team will develop a full stack web application that allows teachers to register supply request lists and allows students to make donation commitments. It also allows both teacher and student users to monitor and update donation activity. We feel this is a significant contribution in that many similar classroom donation websites (e.g. DonorsChoose, AdoptAClassroom) are focused on monetary contributions and require that teachers invest much time in the application process. In contrast, our concept offers a simple tool for teachers so that they are able to efficiently request classroom supplies with much less time and effort on the part of the teacher.

We’ll be developing the project throughout four, 2-week sprints. We have decided on the MERN stack since that seems to be the tech stack where everyone has the most experience developing with.

As shown in the system design diagram above, there will be two types of users. A Teacher will be able to log into the application to create a list of supplies that they would like to have students donate. Students will be directed to a Teacher’s donation list via an email link or by entering a unique identifier to take them to the correct page on the website, where they can then submit what items they want to donate from the list curated by the Teacher.

For the next 2 weeks of our first sprint, we’ll mainly be focusing on creating the data models for MongoDB, setting up our environment, prototyping the UI and design of the web application, and implementing the landing page and user login/authentication. I’m extremely excited to get started working on the project and look forward to seeing what the final outcome will be. Stay tuned for more updates in the following weeks!

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