One of the staples of university student life is student engagement. UBC has a thriving social community with many events taking place everyday. Nonetheless, current tools for researching the options lack flexibility, many events are not listed and events that are listed are difficult to find. Our app is a multi-faceted platform that will allow students to browse through the available events happening on and off campus, save them to their personal calendar, locate them on a map and share with their friends through social media or text messages. The app will be open so that anyone can list an event and the events can be sorted by date, topic or host club/organization. Users will be able to view a map that displays their location and the location of the event making it easier to get to. The goals of implementing our app are to increase awareness of university events, increase attendance at events and support a more social and connected community at UBC.
Have you ever seen the mountain of fridges left in Vanier after move out? Have you ever been frustrated with paying so much for a used textbook at the bookstore? Are you looking for a bike? Want to practice what you have learned in German 101? Our application addresses these issues by creating a UBC specific online marketplace for listing used and new items, and facilitating social interactions and learning. Anybody can list their product or service, providing a short description, price, image, approximate location and contact details. UBC is in a continuous state of flux. Over 45,000 students study on the Vancouver campus. They consume, move in and move out, search for language learning opportunities, etc. Our application provides a service that takes advantage of this fostering a more connected community and offers an opportunity to increase the sustainability of UBC’s campus.
An app which lists people willing to carpool or in need of carpooling. People willing to carpool will have relevant information such as maximum vehicle occupancy, (storage capacity?), travelling location, approximate times of departure and possibly desired gas fare. People in need of carpooling will display relevant information such as baggage, desired time of departure, desired location, and possibly payment. The app has two categories for people ‘providing’ and ‘in-need’ of carpooling, but it can also make ‘hookups’. Every ‘in-need’ entry is checked for providers. Every ‘provider’ is checked for relevant ‘in-needers’. Automated carpool request or provision can also be set for people who do routine grocery runs or school transits. May also include a carbon emissions meter to show the benefits of carpooling.
Access to existing UBC Grade Distribution Database will be helpful in development of this application.Have you ever been confused about what courses are offered, which ones would interest you or what other students have to say about them? CourseVision offers a completely new way for students to learn about courses that are being offered at UBC and helps them decide what courses best suits them. CourseVision provides students with information such as a brief description of the course, grade distribution in previous years, amount of workload and reviews and ratings from other students, all in one centralized location, to help them decide which courses to pick. All this information will be presented in a visual and user-friendly way to make it easier and quicker for students to grasp an overall idea of the course. CourseVisiosn also enables students to compare courses against each other as to further assist them in making their decision. Students will also be able to write their own reviews for each course, rate their courses in terms of difficulty and workload and make an overall suggestion to fellow students about the course.
Eventive will provide students, faculty, and staff with a constantly updated calendar of events happening on campus.
Students, faculty and staff can submit their event details through the application. This will provide faculty, staff, and guest speakers with an effective method to promote awareness of their event. The event will allow users to favorite certain events and provide them with reminders as the event approaches. The application will also feature a news feed that will show recently added events. Users of the application will input information on their status and faculty within UBC upon sign-up. When an event is set up, the creator will select whether this event is open to all or to certain faculties. This way events that are open to only one faculty, will only be advertised to members of that faculty. In addition, there will be an option where the creator selects whether or not registration is needed for the event. If so, the creator will provide the link or instructions for registration. This will allow users wanting to attend the event easy access to registration. The application will also have a tagging system to it. When users create an event they can enter tags such as the faculty, type of event, etc. Users searching for events can input tags to see those events in relation to it. All in all, the goal of this application is to get people involved with campus events; it will allow UBC members to cease opportunities that they may otherwise not know about. As of now, some events do not gain the desired crowd because of lack of awareness. This application will create an easier and effective way to increase participation among campus.
Blazztid allows users and businesses to integrate all of their favourite social media applications and feeds into one easy to use interface
Team Member(s):
David Alfaro
Project Proposal:
So you are new to UBC, new to Vancouver. Its a weekend, exams are over and you wanna check somewhere new so what do you do? Yelp? Urban spoon? Facebook? Twitter? Pinterest?……the list goes on and on. Would it not be great to have all of that information in one place? So you go for dinner at a place…and you love it! You want to post a picture of your meal….but where to? Facebook? twitter? Instagram? Don’t you wish you could easily send it everywhere? So you run a small business here in Vancouver…you know you have to have a social media presence, but do not want to send people on a whirlwind tour of the internet to find all of your accounts. You have been in Vancouver a while now….you have your favourite spots, but….there is always a line and sometimes it isn’t even busy!!!! Would it not be great where peoples facebook and twitter updates about that place get posted? Blazztid allows users and businesses to integrate all of their favourite social media applications and feeds into one easy to use interface. Blazztid is the future of social media networking. Blazztid…..social media driven.
What if we had a way that maintains the targeted nature of ye age old bulletin board, but is adapted to be convenient so that people will actually read it?
All over UBC are scattered bulletin boards, which are an informal way of transmitting an offer, request, event, or something else to a particular group of people. Have you ever really stopped and looked at all the stuff posted on them? Probably not, but people post some really neat things. The great thing about these postings is that they’re targeted. People are defined by where they go, so one can place a flyer in a place that their target audience frequents, knowing that the correct eyes will fall on it. The problem is that bulletin boards are located in hallways and foyers, meaning that the people that see them are passing by on their way to something else, often in a hurry.
What if we had a way that maintains the targeted nature of ye age old bulletin board, but is adapted to be convenient so that people will actually read it? The idea is SmartBulletin, which uses the location aware abilities of a smartphone via WiFi to get an idea of where one goes on c ampus, and then selects events that are “pinned” to buildings via a web interface. The user can then read, on their phone at a convenient time, the offers, requests, and events their phone has filtered for them. So, instead of being uninformed of what’s going on right around you, you can get informed while on the bus, sitting outside in the sun, on your couch, or waiting in that massive line at Timmy’s.
Updates:
04/MAR/2013
Message from Chris:
“Smart Bulletin is now integrated with Facebook! In addition to making directing relevant bulletins towards you based on location data, it also takes into account the events that your Facebook friends are attending. I’ve also added some features for greater interaction with the app, so the data collected there can be used to pick out the highest quality events around campus and direct those towards you.”
I would like to do a phone app that would provide real time routing to locations on the UBC campus. It would use the wayfinding data that is currently available. Right now accessing the wayfinder on your phone is really terrible. Bus stops would also be marked. If you clicked on a bus stop you can a list of busses. If you click on a particular bus, you can get the time that the next few busses would arrive. This is possible now because translink recently released a developer api. It might also be a good idea to tie into Yelp data and mark the available restaurants on campus.