A digital filing cabinet
Necessity is the mother of invention.
For several summers during my college life, and during a few semesters as well, I worked for the Department of Education Studies at the University of Wisconsin - Eau Claire. One of my jobs was to file documents pertaining to certain students in their personal files we had in storage. This was a nightmare. You couldn't read the handwriting of the person who made the file folder. The documents fell apart. There was no way to go through a lot of files quickly to get big-picture information.
Then during the summer of 2014, I was tasked with putting together a large amount of data for a department report. For example, we'd need to know how many students were currently in the program and were in a specific branch of the program (like, teaching High School versus Elementary School) and then compile that information into a spreadsheet.
This. Was. Awful.
Computers are supposed to make our lives easier, right? Why weren't we using any computers in the filing process? I had an idea.
What if we scanned the documents as they were coming in, and attached them to a digital student file? By adding a few comments to the file, and handling some generic student information, we could compile these reports almost instantly by creating a fully searchable database of these files!
Project Guardian was born.
In a capstone class for my Software Engineering degree, as a semester-long project we were to find a local non-profit organization or group on campus and make an application for them. 7 out of 8 groups made a website. Our group...I pitched Guardian. We made it. There were 4 of us, including me, that spent the entire fall semester pouring everything we had learned in classes up to this point into this application. It truly was the culmination of our learning.
For several summers during my college life, and during a few semesters as well, I worked for the Department of Education Studies at the University of Wisconsin - Eau Claire. One of my jobs was to file documents pertaining to certain students in their personal files we had in storage. This was a nightmare. You couldn't read the handwriting of the person who made the file folder. The documents fell apart. There was no way to go through a lot of files quickly to get big-picture information.
Then during the summer of 2014, I was tasked with putting together a large amount of data for a department report. For example, we'd need to know how many students were currently in the program and were in a specific branch of the program (like, teaching High School versus Elementary School) and then compile that information into a spreadsheet.
This. Was. Awful.
Computers are supposed to make our lives easier, right? Why weren't we using any computers in the filing process? I had an idea.
What if we scanned the documents as they were coming in, and attached them to a digital student file? By adding a few comments to the file, and handling some generic student information, we could compile these reports almost instantly by creating a fully searchable database of these files!
Project Guardian was born.
In a capstone class for my Software Engineering degree, as a semester-long project we were to find a local non-profit organization or group on campus and make an application for them. 7 out of 8 groups made a website. Our group...I pitched Guardian. We made it. There were 4 of us, including me, that spent the entire fall semester pouring everything we had learned in classes up to this point into this application. It truly was the culmination of our learning.
The design
...section coming soon!...