Smartphone application for integrating new college students

¶ … Newschool

The usage of Smartphone application is exploding, and the trends have significantly increased the acceptance and installation of million of applications within the Smartphone across the United States and the use of Smartphone has facilitated easy communication among American students. Despite fundamental importance of Smartphone applications, new students in the American colleges and the universities are facing challenges to interact effectively with their peers because of different communication barriers.

Our mission is to take the advantages of the recent trends in the use of Smartphone application by introducing and integrating new school student application, which will allow new students to sell or buy and trade their items using their Smartphone. We envisage that the new project will create a sense of community for students as well as enhancing sustainability in the academic community.

Our project will deliver several benefits to student community. First, our venture will allow students to be instantly connected with other students online using our newly designed Smartphone application. The strategy will allow new students to interact, trade, sell or buy items such as books, clothing, artwork, designs, furniture and other approved items without sacrificing lot of time and costs. New students are often at a loss when they were newly admitted into the school and many of them often face challenges in integrating into the school community due to the difference in race, culture, tastes and demographic profiles. Our new Smartphone application will be a useful tool for new students to integrate easily into the school community. Our project will also serve as virtual student communities where students will be able to interact, and share views that would be of beneficial to overall student community. Research carried out by Groux (2011) in 2010 showed that 99.8% of students own a cell phone, and 49% of them used Smartphone for their communication and the use of Smartphone among students communities increases year-by-year. In 2009, 17% of college students own Smartphone, 49% in 2010, 58% in 2011 and nearly 70% in 2012. As the number of students who own Smartphone increases, our venture will take this advantage to introduce our popular application to allow new students to integrate and communicate easily and effectively among one another. Thus, the introduction of our venture will address the communication problem that new students often face when arriving into the academic community. Our venture will assist new students to interact with their peers as well as assisting them to enjoy benefits of collaboration. Thus, our new application will create an avenue for new students to gain a new knowledge through which they will be able to explore various interests within the academic community.

Despite the benefits that our project will deliver, there are still challenges that our group may face with successful implementation of our newly designed venture. First, some new students may face technical challenges, usability and constraints with the use of the new application. The screen size may deter some students from reading the texts in the Smartphone. Typically, some students may face challenges to read the text in the phone because of common eye problems. The phone memory is another challenge that student may face. To download our application, students will need to have a Smartphone with at least memory of up to 2G. Battery life is another constraint that students may face with the use of our application. Woodcock, et al. (2012) argues that many applications drain battery quickly, which may often debar new students from effective use of our new application.

Despite various challenges that we might have encountered in our project, our venture will enhance sustainable learning thereby improving the well-being of American students. It is essential to realize that the production of new books involve the use of new energy such as electricity, which automatically lead to carbon emission. Our venture will assist students to have access to used books and this will discourage them from buying new books unless it is very important. Thus, buying the old books instead of new books will reduce the energy used in the production of the new books thereby lowering carbon emission for the well-being of American community. Moreover, our venture will allow students to find avenue to dispose their unused books rather than dumping them into the dustbin and create overall environment degradation.

Reflection

Our project is an example of a creative project that assists each member of our group to contribute to the success of the project. The implementation of our project has assisted this researcher to learn several concepts during the project design and implementation. From our project design and implementation, I have been able to learn the art of planning, controlling and evaluation for the successful implementation of a project. The project planning is critical aspect of project design and implementation. Planning involves a systematic method of project implementation for successful completion of a project. Through this project, I learn that planning involves breaking down of a project into a manageable structure in order to complete the project on time and resources. Our project integrates several planning stages as follows:

Feasibility

Design

Effective leader could only Manage the Group

Our project has also made me to understand that an effective leader could manage the group effectively and efficiently in order to assist the group to arrive at their desired goal. To manage conflict during project lifecycle, our group reached a consensus to elect a leader who had vision, leadership skills and be able to assist the group to achieve our desired goal. Thus, we selected a leader from our group based on the following qualities:

Communication Skill

Technical skills

Written skill

Imposing personality

Leadership skills

The great inputs of our leader have assisted in the successful implementation of our project. For example, our leader has contributed immensely in completing the feasibility and designing aspect of the Smartphone application, which has been generally accepted by new students within the academic community.

"Great work has its own Reward"

Concept "great work has its own reward" is much related to the success of our project. Apart from the knowledge that we have accumulated during the project lifecycle, we have been able to assist several new students to address the problems they face when intending to dispose their items. The introduction of our project into the college has assisted many new students to sell their items with easy without sacrificing much time and costs. For example, our project has been able to address the problem of Melissa. The new student faced a challenge to get rid of her college books. Although, she tried other avenues, Melissa could not dispose her books through these avenues because she could not derive benefits from the transaction. Through our application, Melissa has been able to get rid of her books and has derived high benefits from the transaction. Apart from Melissa, our Smartphone application has also assisted other new students in the college to sell, buy and trade their items without incurring costs and time. More importantly, our group has been able to derive satisfaction from our innovative project because we are the first group in the college to introduce this kind of innovative project to assist new students to address their problems.

Now the number of students using our Smartphone application is growing, we are envisaging that we should be able to derive some financial gain from our project. Since the trading through our application is free, we are envisaging integrating credit card payment into our Smartphone application where students will be able to finalize their transactions using credit card payments. We are envisaging charging 1% from the transactions. For example, if a student sells his book $100, our charge from the transaction will be $1. Since the percentages of students using our application keep growing daily, our group will be able to derive rewards from our project.