Week 10 Goals:

• Mentor Feedback
  • Danny – design
  • Michael – development
  • Stride Staff – functionality
• Merge all braches
• Consider implementation of and design badging components

Mentor Feedback

Design

Danny Rankin (TAM Instructor)

At this point in the semester, we are fine tuning design decisions and aiming to create an aesthetically cohesive product, as we are nearing the deadline for our project. After meeting with Danny for what might be the final time, he was quite appreciative of the progress we have made from where we were originally in comparison to where we are now. From minor aesthetic adjustments, to entire page redesigns, Danny was far more useful throughout this semester than we could have ever asked for, and at our last meeting, he only had a few critiques:

• Edit Profile and Change Password buttons on the Profile page
  • “Try playing around with the location and the color choices you want for these. Drop shadows can be helpful but are not always necessary to indicate that something is a button; the text you decide to use can usually be enough. I would recommend filling in the buttons entirely or separating them, one at the top and one at the bottom; lose the drop shadow and maybe see how that looks?”
• New Message and Task Icon
  • “I have my own opinions about these icons but I think you guys should ask some of your peers, and especially students from Stride if at all possible. I know I emphasized using all rounded corners or all sharp corners throughout the application, but design at your own discretion and take outside opinions into deep consideration.”

Functionality

Stride Staff

While user testing was difficult this week due to the Coronavirus, we were still able to get some minor feedback from Stride and will get more concrete feedback coming into next week once all of our code has been merged. We specifically asked Stride for what information they wanted to see on the profile pages of students vs mentors, and will implement that this week:

• Students: grade, school, email
• Mentors: role and email

Stride was excited to see the new development of the connections between mentors and students and loved the way we set up the weekly planner. They also appreciated the code requirement for signing up as a mentor, and told us it may be a good idea to have a code for students as well, so that they really have to be part of the program in order to use the app.

Development

Michael Condon (Associate App Developer)

Michael has been very helpful throughout this whole process and guiding us in the direction of developing on industry scale and quality. Michael is on the March Madness app team, and due to the Coronavirus, has some extra time now that the tournaments been cancelled so was able to give detailed feedback on the progress we’ve made since he’s seen it last.

Things that could be better:

• Making our members as private as possible, for example functions used only within its class. This is helpfully logistically and controls what logic would make sense to be handled outside of the objects scope
• Use Static Structs or models for constants such as our weekdayChoices in PlannerOverallController
• Safely unwrap optionals instead of force unwrapping them. Force unwrapping to find a nil can cause the app to crash
• Keep like functions near each other. You can also through all related logic in an extension to keep files clean. He also suggested separating related functions with pragma marks //MARK: Lifecycle as these are special comments detected by Xcode and can be jumped to, collapsed, etc.
• Finally he commented again to make our View Controllers “as stupid as possible.”

Things we did well:

• He “really really” liked how we created views with “lazy vars”, as this is an “amazing way to organize view attributes”. He also suggested we could set our constraints here even if the constraints reference views that haven’t been made yet because it will create those views if it needs to. “This is a really advanced way to create views so nice work!”
• He appreciated our naming conventions and said this is a good habit.
• He commended us for the fact that we are “willing to extend a generic class” saying “noticing that there is a more efficient way to utilize an existing API and extending it saves a lot of time and makes everyones lives easier.”
• Finally, he commented again on the modularity of our code and specifically said he liked that we split up our collectionView and collectionViewCell classes into separate things.

Finally Michael has also been helping in trying to get the code to run on our phones and getting the app on Testflight.

Badging Design

Week 09 Goals:

• Mentor/Student Connections Functionality 90% Done
• Demo Video Plan
  • Script/Screenplay

Mentor/Student Connections

Demo Video Script

“Welcome to Stride Learning. Stride Learning is a mentoring center for students with ADD, ADHD and other executive functioning needs who might need a little extra help mastering organization and various school subjects. We set out to create an app that the students and mentors would use as a tool to encourage organization, foster communication, and alleviate some of the stress that comes with planning a busy school schedule. Our goal specifically is to help streamline the planning and communication tools that are needed for both mentors and students that are a part of the program.

As a student, you can create a profile that will display certain scholastic information such as your grade, school, email and more. You can then start messaging your personal mentors about anything school related. Questions about homework, assignments, setting up extra tutoring sessions, or anything that you may need a little extra help with. And finally, as a busy student, it is helpful to have a space to write down weekly assignments, upcoming exams, or to set aside time for studying. The planning page can do all that. With its three week spread students have the ability to set tasks for themselves during the current week or for the upcoming week and can also roll back to last week to make sure they didn’t miss anything important. They can set the day of the week that the task needs to be completed, which week, as well as a personalized note that describes what exactly they need to do, and with that, the journey throughout the Stride Learning App begins.

Now as a mentor, you have all the same views as a student but since one mentor can be assigned to multiple different students, you have the ability to switch between your various students to check in on each unique checklist. You can monitor assignment progress, maintain each student’s checklist, and remind them about important upcoming tasks.

Our goal for the Stride Learning app was to create an all-in-one app that combines all the necessary tasks that a Stride student uses on a daily basis to be successful. Planning, communication, and organization are skills that any student needs to be successful. By combining all of this into a singular application, we hope to alleviate some of the stress that can come from using multiple apps, each for a different reason. We want to provide a vehicle for success by creating this app and we hope to encourage every single Stride student to enjoy the sense of organization that our app provides.”

Week 08 Goals:

• Mentor/Student Connections Research
• Design Updates

Mentor/Student Connections Research

We began researching and mapped out the logic for how to implement the mentor and student connections. We plan on using the tab bar controller where the third tab (profile tab) will have a conditional of whether the user is a student or a mentor and if it’s a mentor it will load a table view with all of their students. The students page will load the regular page that we already have built out.

We are adding another value to our user structure called “type” in order to be able to implement this. This value will be set when the user registers.

Design Updates

Custom Icons

Week 07 Goals:

• Planner Page
  • Weekly Section Headers Changing
  • Weekly refresh functionality
  • New task addition
• Design updates
  • Planner page headers
  • Navigation bar customization
  • Profile page buttons
  • Custom error messages design
• Login/Register
  • Add grade and school to login register
  • Update grade and school on profile page
  • Add ability to edit grade and school
• App Icon
  • Create multiple iterations of app icon

Planner Page

Design Updates

Login/Register

App Icon & Custom Alerts