Example Senior Projects

MyGrades iPhone Application

Summary

MyGrades is a grades management application that can be used on Apple's iPhone or iPod Touch. It is designed specifically for students on the go. The MyGrades application gives both high school and college students the ability to keep track of their grades in all their courses almost effortlessly. The student simply adds a course to their application by entering a course name. Once a course is added, graded assignment information for the course can then be entered. Adding an assignment is as simple as entering a name for the assignment, the points earned on the assignment, and lastly the points that were possible for that particular assignment. MyGrades then does the rest. It calculates and displays the student's percentage for that particular assignment, as well as the student's overall percentage for the class. Percentages are even color-coded for quicker understanding. High percentages are displayed in green, low percentages are shown in red, and everything in-between is shown in yellow. The user has the ability to decide what constitutes a high or low grade in the application's settings. Students can also edit assignments after they've entered them. Courses and assignments can also be deleted. This application is simple to use, thus encouraging more students to pay better attention to their grades. The MyGrades application is available in the iTunes App Store.

Technologies Used

This applications was created using the Apple iPhone SDK and the Objective-C programming language. The iPhone SDK supplied the Xcode and Interface Builder software as well as the iPhone Simulator and SQLite3 database. This project was developed on an Apple Mac running OS X.

Give To Get Web Application

Summary

This service-learning project provided a convenient online store which could be used as a fund-raising tool for a church or group of churches. The website sold donated religious items. These religious items included artwork, literature, and jewlery which church members had donated for sale. Once these items were placed on the website, users could browse through the items in the store. They could add items to their shopping carts, delete items, update their carts, etc. A checkout process was provided to place the order represented by a shopping cart. All proceeds from the sales were donated back to the churches which donated the particular items.

Technologies Used

The Give to Get website was created using HTML, cascading style sheets (CSS), PHP (a popular open-source scripting language for creating web applications), and the free, open-source MySQL database.

Janus Firewall

Summary

This project involved setting up and configuring a Linux-based firewall between the CIS department's two servers and the outside world. This was a practical IT project that greatly improved security, restricting avenues of potential attack. The project used a stateful firewall system that runs under a very small-scale distribution of Linux called IPCop. IPCop aims to provide a small, secure operating system for a firewall that has very few unnecessary services and is able to run on fairly simple hardware. IPCop was chosen as the preferred firewall distribution for the project because it provides a very secure method of maintaining a firewall with significantly reduced vulnerability to attack.

The IPCop firewall aims to act as an intermediary between internal servers and the outside world, relaying only data that is considered safe and legitimate to servers on the internal network. The firewall also logs any traffic deemed malicious for later review. It also provides a secure, online interface for remote administration by system administrators that is accessible only from computers residing on the internal network of the firewall. The ruleset for the IPCop firewall is designed by the firewall administrator in such a way that on traffic that is for a certain protocol and attempting to connect to a particular port is allowed to pass into the trusted network and packets not explicitly allowed by any of the rules are not passed into the trusted network.

Technologies Used

Implementing this project required knowledge of computer networking (including the TCP, UDP, and IP protocols as well as network address translation) and Linux system administration.

Secure Sign On Web Application

Summary

The Secure Sign On Application is a web-based application that provides the user with account creation and password-protected account security. This web application gives the user the ability to create a user account that consists of a user's name and the user's personal information such as address and phone number. It then allows the user to create a password that is stored securely in the server database. There is also functionality to retrieve the password if it has been forgotten.

This application can be added on to any web service that requires secure sign on capabilities. It provides an easy solution for added security to an existing transaction processing web service or web site with sensitive information. The goal of this application is to create a more secure password protection policy that prevents account information from being stolen.

Technologies Used

The application makes use of Java security features available in version 1.5 of the Java SDK. Java Beans, JSP (Java Server Pages), and Java servlets are all used, along with the MySQL database and the Eclipse platform. The Apache Tomcat web server was used to deploy the web application.

Scholarly Student Organizer Program

Summary

Scholarly is a Windows application that provides professional-grade personal information management for high school and college students. It manages student schedules, assignments, and grades. Scholarly ensures that you never miss an important assignment thanks to Windows pop-up notifications and easy-to-see visual cues. Find assignments by advanced filtering options, grouping, or an instant search. Scholarly can manage grades using weights or standard averages for individual classes. Students' grades are also marked with visual cues to better show student performance. Scholarly helps any student become organized.

Technologies Used

Scholarly was created using the Microsoft .NET 2.0 framework and the C# language within Visual Studio Express. Scholarly is also in the process of being ported to the Objective-C language for compatibility with Mac OS X and the iPhone. Data is saved in XML files.

Helpdesk Database Application

Summary

This project is an automated help desk program that performs the following operations for its users:

• Call Request
  • Logging of Employee help desk call request input data
  • Assignment of IT problem specific help desk data to IT staff qualified in that problem area and re-assignment of problem specific information based on IT staff current schedule/workload
• Call Response/Update
  • Updating and recording of IT Staff response/input to help desk call request records with respect to a call's Priority, Type, Asset involved, Vendor involved, status and IT staff Comments
• Call Statistics
  • Display of totals for all open and closed help desk call requests
  • Display of totals for all help desk call requests past due, due today and due tomorrow
  • Display of totals for all help desk call requests made by Departments
  • Display of totals for all help desk call requests with Vendors having an asset involved in the call origin
• Call Reports
  • Custom reports on help desk call request records based on timeframe and call Status or IT Staff assignment or call origin
• Help Desk Maintenance
  • Generation and/or update of (supplemental) records corresponding to a help desk Call, User and IT Staff
  • Call (Status, Priority, Type, Asset Type, Vendor, Asset/Vendor)
  • User (Users, Departments, Locations)
  • IT Staff (IT Staff, IT Staff Responsibilities)

Technologies Used

This is a stand-alone database application created with Microsoft Access.

Maintained by: Br. David Carlson
Last updated: October 02, 2009