AN IN-HOUSE DIGITAL ADVANCEMENT OF GEOLOGY 100 LAB

Our Eastern Washington University (EWU) Computer Science Capstone Team built a mobile-friendly Geology 100 Lab web service to reduce paper waste and digitally advance the introductory student lab experience. Working with faculty from Geology and Computer Science at EWU, we designed a web service from the ground up. This included creating a proof of concept as a visual agreement, and a Software Requirements Specification (SRS) document as the verbal agreement. These meetings and documents aligned our understanding of faculty vision with the implementation of our own concepts. Because of our limited time, we decided to piece out the project into waves for future capstone teams to complete. Based on the functionality of the web service and our familiarity with Object-oriented programming, we coded the web service in ASP.NET Model View Controller (MVC) and used Mono to interface with EWU’s UNIX server.

Our chosen component of the project was to set up a database and complete a working model of the Lab Editor tool for the administrative side of the web service. Team responsibilities were divided between: model, view, and controller (MVC). One member created a MySQL database on the server space provided by EWU and an ASP.NET library for our back-end code to communicate with the database (model). One member designed the front-end for the Lab Editor using a Summernote rich text editor and added the ability to create and reorder a dynamic number of Lab Exercises (view). One member coded the back-end which allows the data entered by the user to save and repopulate as a Lab object between the front-end and the server (controller).

The Lab Editor can create, save, and preview (future “student view”) a Geology 100 Lab. Each Lab has a title and a dynamic number of Lab Exercises, each with a response type. Utilizing the rich text editor, faculty can add exercise elements such as text, table, video, image, and hyperlink in order to build a Lab.