Proposal

Proposal:

Students have enough to keep up with in their busy lives especially taking four or five classes at one time. Technology has made communication between professors and students easier, however it hasn’t been improved to the optimum level. This is why the Qwicky App was created. It is downloaded directly to the mobile device such as a smart phone or any other type of phone with internet access and or with Wi-Fi. Applications are convenient because they allow you the user to do a lot of things “on the go” that a regular computer would offer behind a desk, which was emphasized by YouTube, (Nov. 10 2010.)  Some apps depend on internet access for proper use which involves updates such as news apps and other apps such as games that don’t require internet access for use after it has been downloaded into the device as interpreted by OnGuard Online (May 11 2013).  The Qwicky App is available to be downloaded on Iphones, Androids and other Smartphone’s alike by anyone for free. Using your CUNYfirst username students can log into the app which directly connects their student email and blackboard to their profile page. Automatically notifications are sent to your phone notifying the user with every update instantly that comes to their email or blackboard. Posts made by professors are a part of the notifications along with any scheduled assignment updates. For example, if your paper is due within a two day period you will get a notification on your phone both of those days in order to remind you when your paper is due. How cool is that? You never have to set an alarm again! Another important feature of the Qwicky App is that the notification only stops popping up on your screen once you have already checked it. If you as a user don’t check the notification it will continuously keep popping up on your phone screen to remind you. If you check your notifications and keep up with your school work then the app is a full proof way to help you stay organized. If your just a lazy student and don’t then well that’s not something we can fix.

            Another great feature on this app is that when you enroll in a select course the Qwicky app automatically uploads that course onto your homepage by using blackboard and enrollment features on CUNYfirst. Once you are enrolled in another group of courses for your following semester, the app automatically removes the previous courses so that you don’t get confused with your course work and everything stays consistent. This way you only get the information you need for your classes. Plus with this app, communication is made easy. You can instantly send messages, sort of like email, to your professor regarding anything and they get the notification on their phones just like you would. This app makes everything more convenient and organized and overall helps increase student productivity and improve teacher communication. One of the main problems in existence now within the CUNY system is the CUNY email system. Students aren’t always logged into their email accounts and aren’t always aware of the emails that professors may send out and due to that students aren’t aware and lose sight of assignments and important updates. The Qwicky App makes this problem full proof.

            When collaborating to create something new, you need to make sure there isn’t anything on the market that is similar. Then you need to wonder how to come about creating the actual product which is a challenge for someone who doesn’t know everything there is to know about applications and their functions. The first thing that needs to be determined from the inventor is what their app will be tended for. In other words what angle will the inventor base its app on? To create an app and a successful one at that the inventor needs to select an app that is reflective of their “niche or passion” as suggested by CBSNEWS (n.d). Once that “niche or passion” is figured out, the inventor must see how relevant and popular their app will be to the outside world. Let’s face it people will not invest into an app that is simply not worth investing into.

The next thing to consider is whether or not the idea that the app will be based on isn’t already in effect from another user. In other words gauge the competition in the market by doing thorough research. Kristoff, one should do the following: “Go to the app store and search the category. In this case, you’d type [  ] key words that you think could describe your product into the search bar. Is your product already there? Anything similar? If so, what makes yours different and special?  If there’s already an app for this product, is it available for both the iPhone and iPad? Would it work with both, or is it best suited to just one or the other? There’s nothing stopping you from creating and selling an application that’s similar to what’s already out there, of course. But if you want to sell enough to make a profit, you should find a better approach, says Bear Cahill, president of the independent application development company Brain Wash Inc. His advice is “to be first or best — or, better yet, both”, as stated in CBSNEWS(n.d) . This is why the Qwicky App is so unique on its own. Nothing like it exists which makes it more marketable and appealing to consumers but yet also benefits the student population as well as faculty. With hopes in creating a successful product one has to consider all of these elements which aren’t so evident when beginning a search for the kind of approaches you need to take. The Qwicky App has been incorporated by multiple ideas, views, benefits and angles to achieve the utmost capabilities in meeting the needs of students and learning today with improving learning and organization for generations to come.

Documentation

When it came to coming up with the Qwicky App as a group it just jumped out at us. When Argenis had problems accessing his student email account it allowed us to start brainstorming on a way to possibly fix that problem. As people of this technological era, we are always making new usernames and passwords and it becomes overwhelming to remember everything. So with the Qwicky App connected to your email and all of the other student networks everything is under one username and password automatically signed in and on your mobile device or tablet. Since we ourselves were students coming up with this idea we thought of something that would better our learning experience and possibly help others in the long run. Since we have the technology and means its best to use it to our advantage and since nothing like what we thought of actually existed the Qwicky App seemed like the right way to go.

 

How the actually App would work and what its features were was something we had to work on. We had to basically make a list of all the things that would better benefit us if we had the chance to have an application like this on our own phones. In order to understand how we can feature certain things we also needed to understand as a group how an application actually works and is built. Randy and Argenis did a lot of the research on that part then giving Blerta and Christina idea’s to work on as far as what the application could feature and how it would do certain things like send notifications to your phone and access updates.

Building an actual app is somewhat was somewhat of a fundamental way of coming up with a solid idea for a product. We researched different way’s apps were built and one website really broke it down for us nicely enough to understand the actual process and in turn allowed us to increase the productivity that our app could create altogether. One way to go about building an app is to use the web angle. Web apps are becoming increasingly popular in the tech savvy world. The app Builder is a website that offers advice on building a web app. The app builder site states the following: “Web Apps are revolutionary! Say goodbye to expensive developer fees and nervously waiting for subjective app store approvals. Web Apps can be published instantly by anyone for free. Using the latest HTML5 technology your Web App will magically work across all popular devices such as iPhone, iPad, Android, and Windows” as shown on the App Builder website (n.d). The app builder allows those that are interested in building a web app to go about the process easily. This helped us shape our idea more thoroughly and when it comes down to it in order to create something you need to understand the steps in order to make it.

 

Once we went through the glitches and ran through what we wanted to create we also had to make sure nothing like it really existed on the market. We researched online and found different tech blogs and read what kind of things people have suggested in the past on making app’s and what kind of app’s should be made. Some of it really helped shed some light on some pretty good ideas which helped us try to shape ours even better. Kumar (2013, March 13) made a lot of suggestions on this blog site that led us to think about connecting the CUNY emailing system to the app as well. Some other suggestions about app’s in general really helped us make ours something that would be more marketable. The name of the app the Qwicky App came from Blerta just because it sounded like something that would be quick and instant which is what the app is all about. Not having to go through the hassel of going through 15 different directories to get information about one class.

 

In order to present our idea the right way we thought of making a powerpoint presentation and using our technology wits to woo the crowd. It helps to know how to use other means especially since our product is an app. We have to prove that we know what we are talking about and what better way to do that but use other ways to visually present an idea that will be booming in the market pretty soon.

 

The only thing I would have suggested for this project was that we would have had a little more time with it. There was a lot of thought involved and we could have mastered everything more efficiently if we had more time. Maybe if the project was done before the research paper we would have mastered our researching skills better and it would have helped us better our research papers in the long run. Just a thought, but overall the project itself was a success because the app we created is definitely a catch and we can say that it would be something that every student could definitely benefit from and use along with faculty to make their learning experience smoother and easier than it is now.