Ball State Field Trips is a multi-platform application developed to provide an immersive experience teaching Indiana’s history to the state’s 3rd to 5th graders. It was the revamping of a former Ball State program which used a live PBS program to teach children a wide variety of subjects. We kept the live show and added an iPad app and Web app as second screen experience. You can read more about BSU Field Trips here.
I co-led this project throughout the process, lasting from March to around December 2016.
Project Components
Development Technology
- AngularJS
- PHP
- NodeJS
- Swift
- AWS
My Roles
- Development Team Leads
- Code review
- Managing and assigning tasks
- Angular Admin Panel
- PHP Backend
- Help create endpoints to create, read, update, and delete items from the admin panel.
- Help create functionality to upload images and videos to AWS.
- Node Backend
- Create all endpoints needed to get data from database to the apps.
- Create logic to get pushed events from admin panel and emit them to the apps.
- iPad 360 video player
- Implement and modify a 360 degree video player that allows users to move an iPad around and move their perspectives in the video.
Challenges
- Team/inter-team communication
- Due to the scale of the project, communication was key to keep everyone on the same page.
- Learning Node
- Writing the entire backend.
- iOS Development
- Had very little prior experience working with Swift or Objective C.
- Hard Set Deadlines
- Not only for myself, but making sure my team did as well.
- Fixing bugs on admin panel
- Constant changes led to many bugs being inadvertently created.
Skills Gained
- NodeJS development
- Communication between varying disciplines.
- Ability to read and debug different styles of code written by other developers.
- Ability to keep a cool head and achieve milestones when hard-set deadlines neared