CST 462S - Race Gender & Class Digital World - Week 8

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My service learning experience was great overall. I had the opportunity to work with a classmate to create a tool for The Furnace Teen Center. The project was to build a sign-in form that students could use before starting an activity. For example, if a student wanted to do some reading, they would scan a QR code that took them to a form where they entered their info. That info was then sent to a spreadsheet so the site supervisor could track who was participating and when.

One thing I think could be improved is making the tool work more like a gym check-in system. Each student could have a membership card that, when scanned, would automatically log their activity into a database. But to do that, we would need to build Android and iOS apps, which takes way more time than the 25 hours we had. This kind of project really needs someone with experience in app development and a longer timeline to do it right.

One of the biggest challenges was the time limit. Since we only had 25 hours, we had to build a simple Google Scripts app that worked on both Android and iOS. There were also a lot of extra features the site supervisor wanted, but we couldn’t add them all because we ran out of time.

My advice for future students is to ask a lot of questions before starting the project. The site supervisor might not realize how long something will take, especially if they don’t have a technical background. What sounds simple might actually take 100 hours or more to do well. So it’s important to understand the full scope of the project before diving in.


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