Dreams for Schools is a non-profit organization established to inspire, create and educate students to be STEM literate with hard and soft skills needed to become the critical thinkers, creative leaders, and technologists of tomorrow. Our team was tasked with building a web-based application that facilitates the process of judging student competitions.
We are Team Dream-Works! A team comprised of six of dedicated and hardworking University of California Irvine undergraduates majoring in Informatics or Software Engineering. Our team has the strength in numbers as each of us possess a unique set of skills.
Team Leader
Backend
Front-end Lead
Scrum Master
Front-end
Back-end
In order to best deliver upon our sponsor's vision, we re-structured our team to have one group specializing on Frontend tasks while the another group focuses solely on the Backend; this was a much needed step given our project's large scope. We prioritized implementing the administrative functionalities within the Fall Quarter and shifted to the Judging portion during Winter Quarter. Using the Agile methodology our team worked in biweekly sprints of:
Team Meetings | Planning | Designing | Developing | Testing | Evaluating
Upon each week, our team had a check-in meeting with our Sponsors, Nithin and Audrey. The meetings allowed for our team to demo what we were able to accomplish, and receive immediate feedback. Most of our design and implementation decisions were determined by the existing Figma UI mockup.
Challenges
Throughout our two quarter journey, the team faced many challenges from the likes of:
Technical Debt
Learning Curve
Scope
Time Management
Learning Experiences
The development process has taught our team very valuable lessons. The challenges that we faced taught us:
Setting hard-deadlines are important for continual progress.
Thinking selflessly and not selfishly, since our application needs to be maintained, expanded, and supported in the future.
Our team began the project by reviewing all the materials that were provided by our sponsors.
API Documentation
Database Structure
Figma
Project Structure
Deliverables Document
System Prototype
After some careful consideration, our team began redesigning the Figma UI mockup to follow basic UX principles and created user-stories that aligned with all the functionality that the new application required. As we implemented changes to the existing prototype, our team:
Created detailed instructions for setup and maintenance.
Produced UML Diagram and Entity Relationship Diagrams of the system.
We created a sprint report at the end of each bi-weekly sprint, allowing us to summarize our completed/non-completed task, reflect, and learn how to improve on the next sprint. The Requirements and Design has been a living document throughout the two-quarters, as it contains what and describes how we built the application. Upon delivery of the system to our sponsors for testing, we produced a Testing Feedback form listing out:
Works/ Fully Functional
Not Working/ Needs Revision/Should Add
Does not work/ Not Implemented
Evaluation
As our team implemented new functionality onto the web application, we conducted testing internally to ensure our work meets the high standards that are expected by our sponsors. Upon periodic delivery of the system to our sponsors for testing, we produced a Testing Feedback form listing out:
Works/ Fully Functional
Not Working/ Needs Revision/Should Add
Does not work/ Not Implemented
The feedback form was essential to continually building the application, as it allowed our team to have further insight onto what we still needed to work on and improve.
From the beginning, we envisioned that our final deliverable would be a fully functional application with enhanced functionality and a UI/UX overhaul. The final build is a web-based application for administrators and judges to facilitate the judging process for Dreams for Schools sponsored student competitions.
Administrative Portal
Create/Edit Class
Create/Edit Event
Overview
Student Teams
Industry Representatives
Judging Assignments
Create/Edit Criteria
Project Scores
Presentation Scores
Manage User Accounts
Switch between Admin/Judge View
Judge Portal
Overview
Judging Deadline (Time Remaining)
View all Assigned Teams
Scoring
Save/Submit Scoring
