Final Reflection

​

Hi. My name is Scott and I am a student at Southern Utah University. As part of my educational experience, I engaged in something known as an EDGE project. EDGE stands for ‘Education Designed to Give Experience,’ and is a self-driven project that allows me to add real world experience to my degree. I came up with the idea, pitched, got it approved, executed my plans, and then reported on the results.  The purpose behind the project is to teach us how the real world works, outside of school, by having us fully in charge of every aspect of a project. Granted, odds are you won’t fully be in charge of every detail of a project as you will work with others in a team, but it gives you a much different prospective that the typical school assignment.

 

For my EDGE project, I choose to pursue something I was interested in that is outside of my major. I am majoring in Finance but computers have always intrigued me. Some of the questions I had were: How do they work? and How does some code someone writes result in a box made of metal and wiring being able to send an email or process rocket science calculations? I also believe that understanding computers better will be a great skill to have in the coming years.  As a result, for my project I designed and built an Android Application to learn the basics of software development.

 

What does my app do? Great question! My app acts as a time clock, allowing the user to ‘Clock In’ and ‘Clock Out’. It stores all of the data so that you can report that time to your employer come pay day. Not only that, but it detects your current ‘status’ (Clocked In versus Clocked Out) and gives you the appropriate action. For example, if you are currently ‘Clocked In’, the next step is to ‘Clock Out,’ and vice versa.

 

My inspiration for this app idea came from work. I grew frustrated with how our current system for clocking in and out worked. (It was way too complicated with way too many stats that no one paid any attention to.) I decided to go for something I had no idea how to achieve and wrote an app that allows one to clock in and out from their phone.

 

Now, why did I decide to learn Android programming? Another great question! Android owns the majority of the market share when it comes to phones. People always have their phones on them and so it made a lot of sense to make it so that people could use something they always had with them to record their time. It’s not uncommon that someone who drives around forgets to clock in and has to call the office and have them record that they actually got to work at 7:30am and not the 10:00am when they remember to call. How do you fix this problem? Have people record their own time - and do it on a device they always carry with them.

 

Shifting gears a little bit, I want to discuss what this experience has taught me. When I started with this idea, I had no idea the process that went into developing an application. As I worked through the process, I refined my ability to think through things logically - computers are very particular when it comes to sequencing. I also greatly improved my ability to track down and diagnose problems. Inevitably, especially as this was my first time writing code, I wrote a plethora of bugs. However, I was able, through much painstaking frustration, to track them down and figure out the correct way to do something and get the app working. Not only did I learn the basics of coding, but I also learned how to better think through problems and come up with ways to fix and solve those problems.

 

In the end, I would consider this project a success. I was able to take an idea and figure out how to achieve the desired outcome. It was a great lesson to me in perseverance and determination as well as a lesson in how I can overcome obstacles (even as big as not knowing how to do something) if I just keep at it.