Team: Boyd Compton, Emma Drobina, Sowjanya Garigipati, Ryan Hodge, Colin John
The capstone project is the final project for University of South Carolina computer science students. Over the course of an academic year, students work with a client to create a product with real business value. For our project, my team and I designed an updated research portal for the Office of Undergraduate Research (OUR). Our goal was to provide an improved experience for both students seeking professors to do research with as well as professors looking to present their research in the most informative and attractive way. This post will cover the first semester of the Capstone course.
We started the project by meeting with OUR and discussing the needs this project had to meet, and what improvements could be made over the current research portal. Following this, we began the design process.
a wireframe drawing of the home screen
I drew wireframes for the rough designs and created a color scheme for the website based on the school colors, as well as helped design the database schemas. After we had designs approved by our professor and clients, we began development. I started creating the basic structure of the home and results page in Angular 2, HTML, and CSS. Once this was done, I created the initial service connecting the Angular 2 frontend to the Django backend, which populated the results page with faculty members. Finally, I helped present our team’s progress during the end-of-the-semester demo.
Prior to this project, I had never used either Angular 2 or Django. I completed tutorials to learn the basics, and then worked with my teammates who had prior experience in these language to expand my proficiency. Additionally, I was able to draw on my prior design experience from Ward One, which helped me create a strong color scheme and effective layouts for our users.