Danielle Tedesco

At the beginning of the semester we were asked to devise a plan of action of how we could implement technological resources to better the community.    It was difficult to come up with a singular idea to stick with, as there was a multitude of excellent ideas and quite the aresenal of resouces at hand.

When our group was formed, we disucssed how we could recycle e-waste and provide the refurbished machines to children in need.  This was an incredibly exciting project as there are multiple benifactors.  

We harnessed multiple software platforms within the Adobe Suite:  Illustrator & Photoshop to design the interface and logos, Dreamweaver to create the web platform.  Outside of the Adobe platform we used Filemaker to rapidly prototype, an interesting software in itself.

There were many difficulties our team faced, as these were new softwares to us.  We continued to constrain the scope of our project, and agreed the iterative design process would be the best way to have our project grow.

This project taught me how to encompass multiple resources to create an application that could potentially better the world.

Michael Matza: Working on a project of this caliber was definitely a challenge that was worthwhile and rewarding. Coming up with a topic was actually difficult because everything I wanted to do was to improve a situation for a population that wasn't disadvantaged at all. Originally, I looked to help the Stony Brook student population and their enrollment process by working with Solar. Eventually we decided on providing poor children and adults with refurbished computers and related accessories. We had to scale this down even further to just children because our scope was too wide.

As a group we had to determine the requirements of our database and we went through several layout changes in the process. We also had to determine what type of fields to create (comment box/radio button/container field,etc). At first we had every field on one page and that was too cluttered for our users. Then we decided to place about three fields of information on each page, which didn't work. We found the happy medium that we're at now and it seems to look good.

After making layouts and specific buttons uniform throughout the pages, we had to error trap and pretend we were both types of users: managers and volunteers. We found that our old layouts had to be revised so that volunteers could not edit manager data and so that volunteers could not access manager screens. This was a security issue that we resolved. We wrote scripts and directed users to their appropriate layouts. We also eliminated steps that we found to be redundant to make for a better user experience.

While each of our group members has their forte's (networking/gopher,etc), we all learned from each other so that we at least had basic skills in each field. We all were in constant communication on Facebook and met after classes, always listening and responding to each other's recommendations and plans for the project.

I definitely feel that my User Interface, Database Directory, User Permissions, Error Trapping, and Script writing skills improved by working on this project.

**Here, have each team member write some of the challenges they faced and how they worked to overcome them. Write about the skills that you took away from working on this project.**