Updates from the University of Queensland, Australia, Brisbane

Hey Guys! Wanqi and Shellen here. We've been asked to help update the IMI blog by Alastair and Alvin ages ago, but we got too wrapped up with our activities over here that we only got round to doing it now. *Grins*

Anyway, 18th Feb, our last day of work in UQ. It has been a busy day for us here, since we had a meeting and presentation of what we have been working on in the morning, and another meeting with the school clerk about administrative matters later in the afternoon. For those of the people who may know us, Shellen and I have been here for close to four months now, and both of us have been assigned to work on individual projects. Below is a brief description of our projects:

Shellen – [AirBiff]

The project, AirBiff, aims to promote awareness among people around us by enabling to send and receive information about each others' current activity. The concept of designing and evaluation of the AirBiff system allows users to freely create, share and use a variety of activity indicators (biff application) to create awareness to people.

Currently, one of the biggest problems which AnyBiff (Version 1 built by Markus Rittenbruch) faced was to support distributed groups to develop for multiple platforms such as Windows, Macintosh. The deliverables for this project will be building the application using Adobe Air and Flash Actionscript 3. The Adobe AIR platform provides a way to develop cross-platform applications which simplifies the process of developing collaborative tools that can be used in real-world settings.

Wanqi – [UQ Equipment Booking System]

During my stay here, I have been working on re-writing the equipment booking system that students have been using to book equipments for the various school projects. In the beginning months, I have spent much of my time doing research and also gathering user requirements for the new system. To achieve this, Dr Viller helped me in arranging meetings and interviews with the students and staff, and has also held many meetings to brain storm about how the system can be made as efficient and user friendly as possible. Besides conducting interviews, I have also done up class diagrams and the site structure to help me better understand how the entire site would work and link together.

In the process of developing my application, I have incorporated the use of Spry data, PHP, Javascript and CSS to achieve some interactive features such as live! Search. Ultimately, the main aim of my project is to allow for students to book equipment easily and conveniently, while enabling the admin office staff to retrieve the equipment in the easiest way possible as well.

This is our supervisor, Dr Stephen Viller. He was the one guiding us through the duration of our projects, and encourgaed us to do a lot of research and understand the concept of the projects, what users wanted before jumping to programming.

We also had another working partner called Andew Dekker, who was our go-to-guy when we needed help with programming. 

Besides working at the UQ five days a week, we have also planned various outings here during the weekend, which usually takes us to activities like hiking up mountains, theme parks, a little shopping here and there, and group outings to beaches and overnight camps out in the nature. While here, we also made many friends from all around the world, etc, Sweden, Germany, China, Taiwan, Peru, Fiji, Sri Lanka, Australia, and to our very surprise, Singapore. It was great as we managed to forge a close bond through our 4 month stay here, and had many memories together which we would take with us as we move on with life.

Shellen and I would also be extending our stay here for a week to travel to Tasmania for a 6 day outdoor adventure trip. We will be going with Robin – our friend from Germany – and two other girls. Our stay here in Aussie will end on the 26^th of February, where we would be flying back home to Merlion City.